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FUNDAMENTAL FACTS 
FOR THE TEACHER 



BY 



ELMER BURRITT BRYAN, LL. D. 

President of Colgate University 
Author of " The Basis of Practical Teaching " 




SILVER, BURDETT AND COMPANY 

BOSTON NEW YOEK CHICAGO 






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Copyright, 1911, by 
SILVER, BURDETT AND COMPANY 



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PREFACE 



Since the publication of "The Basis of Practical 
Teaching," there has been a wide-spread demand for 
a second book which should follow the lines of character 
building or moral training. "Fundamental Facts for 
the Teacher" has been written with the view of meeting 
this demand. Very briefly I have tried to develop the 
thought that the end of all human activities is life, and 
that this end can be attained through no hook or crook 
or by-process, but only in the processes of real living. 
We are made or unmade in the activities of life. I have 
the hope that this book will appeal not only to teachers 
and students, but to the general public as well. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGB 

I. The Distinctive Work of the School .... 7 

II. The Motives of the School 13 

III. Attention and Conduct 18 

IV. Suggestion and Conduct . .24 

V. Belief and Conduct 31 

VI. Fear and Conduct . 37 

VII. Self-Respect and Conduct 42 

VIII. Ideals and Conduct 46 

IX. Models and Ideals 50 

X. The Psychology of an Abiding Ideal .... 56 

XI. The School and Ideals 61 

XII. The Roots of Character 67 

XIII. Will, the Center of Character 74 

XIV. Work and Character 81 

XV. Play and Character 87 

XVI. Persistence and Character 92 

XVII. Choice and Character 100 

XVIII. The School and Character 107 



CHAPTER I 
THE DISTINCTIVE WORK OF THE SCHOOL 

There is no other institution in which the Ameri- 
can people are so universally and keenly interested 
as they are in the school, and there is no subject 
so widely and intelligently discussed by the masses 
as is the subject of education. This is not surpris- 
ing for in addition to the benefits which are derived 
directly from the schools by all classes of people who 
attend or patronize them, and indirectly even by 
those who do neither, there are many things which 
contribute to this general interest. 

From the homes of the rich and the poor, the native 
born and the foreign born, the professional classes and 
the tradesmen, go the children into the schools, and 
there they have their victories and their defeats, their 
glad hours and their sad hours. They mingle with the 
bright and the dull. They come under the discipline 
and instruction of strangers whom they often come to 
revere, sometimes to dislike. It is a new world to the 
young child, and remains a distinctive world through- 
out his student years. The school is the topic of 
conversation in the home; and parents, older brothers 
and sisters, and even brothers and sisters too young 
to be in school, have an interest in it. Furthermore, 

7 



8 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

all our people support the school regardless of per- 
sonal benefits directly derived therefrom. There is 
perhaps no interest so vital as a vested interest. 
Even if people are not directly participating in an 
enterprise or an institution, if their money is used in 
its support they are apt to have an interest in it. 
The special days in our schools — flag day, arbor day, 
anniversary days, commencement — all offer the pub- 
lic opportunities for recreation, entertainment and 
instruction which the mass of the people are not 
slow to accept. As a result of all this there is very 
wide and deep interest in the schools notwithstanding 
the apparent apathy and unconcern. 

So much is the school a part of our lives and our 
daily Hving that we take it for granted; we accept the 
school, as we do the mountains and the valleys about 
us. Before we were, it was; and as with all social 
inheritances we look upon it almost as a law of 
nature. But in this unquestioning acceptance of the 
school, which is at once the great force for higher 
levels in hfe and the great leveler, too many of our 
people forget that it is but one of five great organized 
social agencies whose function is to help the people, 
each of course in its own distinctive way. In practi- 
cally every community, while perhaps not too much 
is demanded of the school, wrong things are de- 
manded, and the school is not free to do its own 
work well. It is always a mistake to ask the school 
to assume the responsibihties and bear the burdens of 
other institutions, and not infrequently is this done. 
The home, the church, business and even the state 



THE DISTINCTIVE WORK OF THE SCHOOL 9 

are offenders here. Delinquent parents demand of 
the school work which constitutes the legitimate 
reason for the home. The church, whose function is 
the increase of righteousness in the world, makes 
illegitimate demands upon the school. Business de- 
mands a degree of skill and a power of adjustment 
which it is never the function of the school to confer 
or develop. The state demands of the school that it 
shall turn out law-abiding, public-spirited citizens. 
No one questions that the school has an obligation 
here, but it is too much to demand such results of 
the school in the face of dishonest practices in the 
home, questionable business methods in the markets, 
and graft and misrule in the state. These institu- 
tions must mutually reenforce one another. The 
work of the school will tell in all the others, but it 
will tell most fully when it is no longer burdened with 
their work and is free to do its own work in the most 
effective way. We must realize that the benefits 
derived from the school will be large in proportion as 
it does its own work; and because the school holds so 
important a place in our lives we must not therefore 
demand of it service which it is not its province to 
render, and so handicap it in rendering the much 
higher service which is its function. 

The one distinctive function of the school is de- 
velopment of the entire child. The child enters the 
school undeveloped in mind and body. He is young, 
inexperienced, weak and comparatively helpless men- 
tally and physically. The function of the school is 
to train so that the child will develop a degree of 



10 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

mental and physical mastery; to teach so that the 
child will gradually come out of the bondage of 
ignorance into the freedom of knowledge; to give 
ample and varied opportunities for mental and 
physical exercise so that the child will come out of 
weakness into strength; and to cultivate the habit of 
apphcation and independence of movement so that 
the child will become able to exercise his own initiative 
and to plan his own programs of life. Such is the 
legitimate work of the school. There will of course 
be many by-products, as there are in all life's pro- 
cesses, but the one thing for which the school should 
aim is development. For this all things else exist. 
Whatever does not contribute directly or remotely 
to development as the final fruitage can be no 
legitimate factor or process of the school. This is the 
final test. Does the superintendent of schools make 
his contribution to the development of the children? 
Is this contribution a large and generous one ? Then 
the superintendent has justified his existence as such. 
The same test apphes to teachers, janitors, the money 
expended in laboratories, Ubraries, gymnasia, play- 
grounds, etc. Whatever makes for the enlarged fife 
of the child — pictures, music, Greek, Delsarte, physi- 
cal appliances — has a place and should be admitted as 
an important factor. Tradition and custom notwith- 
standing, whatever does not make for the enlarged 
life of the child should be eliminated as having no 
place in the school. 

It is not the function of the school to prepare the 
children for particular work in the world. Even in 



THE DISTINCTIVE WORK OF THE SCHOOL 11 

our largest cities, where life is differentiated and the 
division of labor carried to the extreme, neither parent, 
teacher nor child can predict what the child may be 
doing in a comparatively short time after leaving 
the school. The rapid invention of machinery, the 
change of work due to accident and unforeseen de- 
velopments, make any such prediction hazardous. 
If the child is developed, and this is the work we 
have a right to expect the school to undertake, he will 
find it comparatively easy to make the adjustments 
necessary to meet the varying vicissitudes of life; but 
if he is fitted for one thing, even well fitted, he is 
hopelessly lost in the event of displacement. The 
work of adjustment, of special preparation for special 
things, should never be expected of the school; such 
work is beyond its province, and comes later in life, 
when the child is no longer in the school and is out 
making his adjustments to life as he finds it, as it 
exists for no other being in the world, and as it can 
not be idealized in any school. This is even true in 
the professional schools. How much truer then in 
the common schools? A young man learns medicine 
and the allied lines of science in the Medical College. 
He learns to be a physician in the actual practice of 
his profession. The same thing is just as true of the 
lawyer, the minister and the engineer. Power of 
adjustment to the actual things comes only through 
exercise in adjusting to actual things. The greatest 
service the school can render the professions and 
specialized labor of all kinds is to turn over to them 
well-developed men and women. 



12 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

Now the school must know that this is its work and 
it must be faithful to its task. The superintendent 
or teacher who does not have a clear conception of 
the real work of the school has not learned the most 
important lesson of his profession. The school should 
not allow itself to be stampeded into false positions 
and impossible undertakings by the clamors of even a 
sincere though a more or less thoughtless public. In 
these days, when every conceivable subject is knock- 
ing at the door of the school and asking or demanding 
admittance, it is more important than ever to have a 
restatement of the function of the school and a very 
clear conception of the work which it should do. We 
shall lose ground and do weak work if we have but a 
vague conception of what we are about. We shall 
gain ground and render an unprecedented service if 
we have a clearly defined conception of our work, and 
the courage to follow it. 



CHAPTER II 
THE MOTIVES OF THE SCHOOL 

In the preceding chapter the purpose was to set 
forth in brief but clear and concise form the work 
which the school may legitimately undertake. The 
plans, devices and methods employed will be numer- 
ous, and as varied as the conditions under which 
the work is done. Such things must be left to the 
ingenuity and good judgment of the teacher. Never- 
theless all teachers, if they understand well the organ- 
izing idea or the function of the school, will have the 
same ultimate aim. This aim is capable of definition, 
and its importance is primary and fundamental. 
There is, however, another factor so subtle as almost 
to evade discussion, yet so important in determining 
the character of all work that we must not fail to 
give it thought in connection with our consideration of 
the function of the school. It is the question of the 
motives of the school. There are four legitimate 
motives: (1) the individual motive of the student; 
(2) the individual motive of the teacher; (3) the 
social motive of the student; (4) the social motive of 
the teacher. 

The individual motive of the student is the accom- 
plishment of the tasks set. Occasionally it is well to 

13 



14 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

hold before young children, as far as it is possible to 
do so, the ultimate results of the work they are about. 
But this should seldom be done, and whenever we do 
so we take the risk of developing a habit of life some- 
what similar to the habit of turning to the close of a 
book to see how it is going to come out, thus robbing 
ourselves of the thrill and the joy of following the 
development step by step. It is not desirable that 
children should be dwelling upon the great things 
that are ahead. The normal mental attitude of the 
child is that of application to the task before him, 
a desire to accomplish it, and a joy in its accom- 
phshment. The student thinks that his work is the 
solution of the problem, the demonstration of the 
proposition, the translation of a chapter, the analysis 
of a compound or a plant, or the recital of a campaign. 
It would be indicative of abnormal self-centering for 
the child, or even for the more mature student in the 
public schools, to say, "Now I shall spend an hour in 
developing my mind by working in mathematics or 
science or language." The individual motive of the 
student is the accomphshment of the task. The 
great benefits to be derived from such accomplish- 
ment in the form of strength of character and prepa- 
ration for larger things ahead are only in a small and 
vague way motives in his work. 

The individual motive of the teacher is different. 
He insists upon complete and accurate work, upon 
correct results. In the solution of the problem in 
whatever subject it may arise, the correct method 
must be pursued, fallacies avoided and correct re- 



THE MOTIVES OF THE SCHOOL 15 

suits obtained. He is even more profoundly inter- 
ested in the student's accomplishment of the task than 
is the student himself, yet this is not the ultimate 
motive of the teacher. The student looks upon the 
assignment as the thing to be accomplished. The 
teacher looks upon the student's development as the 
thing to be accomphshed. The student is interested 
in mathematics, geography or chemical results. The 
teacher is interested in human results. The student 
is set on mastering this book on arithmetic. The 
teacher knows that by the use of another arithmetic 
he could accomphsh his purpose equally well. The 
study in which the student is interested is the means 
whereby the teacher realizes his professional end, which 
is the development of the student. The individual 
motive of the student is the accomplishment of the 
work. The individual motive of the teacher is the 
accomplishment of the student through his work. 

Later in his student life the student comes to have 
more far-reaching and comprehensive motives; he be- 
comes less centered on the thing in hand as the one ulti- 
mately worth while; he becomes socialized, his school 
activities come to have less final value in themselves, 
and seek a larger meaning outside themselves; and finally 
they come to be regarded not as ends in themselves 
but merely as means to higher ends. The accomplish- 
ments of the schoolroom come to have a social signifi- 
cance, and the student discovers that he is actuated by 
a social motive. He becomes desirous of having his 
schoolroom tasks and performances of such a character 
as to relate themselves to the busy world outside. 



16 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

At this point in the development of the student he 
finds himself trying to decide what he is going to 
be and what he is going to do. He is sometimes 
pathetically ill at ease because he has not chosen 
his profession or business. He desires now to work 
toward some definite end. He is not yet the friend of 
"general culture." He feels that the great discovery 
ahead of him is his life's work. He does not yet real- 
ize that the great discovery ahead of him is himself. 
He does not yet fully realize that many of the misfits 
in life may be due to the fact that men and women 
have not discovered themselves, that they have 
stopped just short of the physical laboratory, the art 
studio, or the classics, and that their kingdom re- 
mains undiscovered. 

In high school and college the longing to be 
somebody and to do something, to get out into the 
world and help along, is very pronounced. Such a 
longing is legitimate and beautiful; in it there are 
hope and encouragement. The danger here is that be- 
fore discovering himself and finding his own work the 
student may go out to accomplish before his character 
has acquired proper development. Working thus, the 
results must always be partial and unsatisfactory. 
To the realization of this social motive of the student 
nothing contributes so largely as do the individual 
motives of the student and the teacher. When the 
student has accomplished his tasks faithfully and fully 
and the teacher has accompHshed the student's develop- 
ment through this full and faithful performance of his 
tasks, the student is ready to follow the social motive. 



THE MOTIVES OF THE SCHOOL 17 

The social motive of the teacher is closely akin to 
the social motive of the student, although more com- 
prehensive and general. The student is actuated by 
the motive to do his own work; his motive is special- 
ized service. The teacher's individual motive — the 
development of the child — has its fruitage in the 
teacher's social motive of service. It is of small 
concern to him in what particular channel the student's 
life shall run and what particular service he shall 
render. The teacher simply desires that the stu- 
dent shall be of large account in the world. For 
his student as an individual the teacher covets the 
larger life, human wealth; for his student as a social 
factor he covets service. 

The four legitimate motives then of the school are : 
(1) the individual motive of the student — doing the 
work assigned ; (2) the social motive of the student — 
doing his own work in the world; (3) the individual 
motive of the teacher — the enlargement of the 
student's life ; (4) the social motive of the teacher — 
through the enlarged life of the student, a large service 
to society. 



CHAPTER III 
ATTENTION AND CONDUCT 

If the function of the school is the development of 
the entire child, then the teacher must not attempt to 
educate any one set of faculties at the expense of any 
other. He must not try to train the mind without 
at the same time training the body. For physical 
well-being is not only an end in itself, but it is the 
basis for the development of all other ends. 

Few persons realize how close the relationship is 
between good health and consistent, effective atten- 
tion. While the relationship is not one of cause and 
effect, it is certainly one as close as that of condition 
and resultant, because attention being a most fatiguing 
process, it follows that without an abundance of 
vitality upon which to draw, long-continued atten- 
tion is impossible. 

The close relationship between good health, or the 
abundant life, and conduct is proverbial. Every one 
knows how nearly impossible it is for a nervous 
child in the home or in the school to behave itself, to 
order its conduct consistently, and every wise parent 
or teacher takes into account the health conditions of 
the child under his direction and makes due allow- 
ance for deUnquencies in conduct which have their 

18 



ATTENTION AND CONDUCT 19 

origin in deficient nervous supply and control. We 
all recognize the close relationship and parallelism be- 
tween mental states and physical states, and from this 
close relationship has arisen the pedagogical maxim or 
ideal of ''a sound mind in a sound body," thus recog- 
nizing the impossibility of the one without the other. 
It is a well established and accepted fact that there is 
no psychosis without neurosis, but it is not generally 
known that there is a psychosis peculiar to physical 
conditions and to physical and neural states. The 
consumptive is proverbially hopeful and cheerful, 
and although cognizant of the fact that the last days 
are not far distant, he lives in the mental frame of 
one who has an eternity in which to accomphsh his 
temporal plans. Suspicion, irritabihty, stubbornness 
are generally observed on the part of people who have 
been overtaken by deafness. A high degree of sen- 
sitiveness, physical and mental, characterizes the 
individual who has early in life been deprived of the 
sense of sight. The otherwise healthy young person 
who has been crippled so that he cannot enter into 
the sports, games and contests of his associates, is apt 
to become morose, envious and uncharitable. So 
that in this most general and by no means scientifically 
demonstrated way we see for our purpose here the 
very close relationship between physical states and 
mental attitudes, and the very close relationship be- 
tween complete physical life and wholesome, sym- 
metrical conduct. This close relationship has in it 
largely the intermediary factor of attention, the 
abundant physical life determining the direction and 



20 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

the power of the attention, which in its turn gives 
birth to the style of conduct. 

It is true that as a man " thinketh in his heart," so is 
he, but this means supreme attention, the focusing of 
one's Hfe upon a thing. The thinking in his heart 
means that he has become absorbed in the thing and 
lost to himself and to the world. The necessary re- 
sult of such thinking and such attention is conduct in 
direct harmony with the object of attention. No one 
ever puts forth effort to secure a thing or to avoid it 
unless he has some knowledge of that thing, and no 
one has knowledge of a thing who has not attended to 
it. Attention is a prerequisite to knowledge, and 
knowledge is a prerequisite to behavior or conduct. 
So that the world of attention determines more largely 
than anything else, through knowledge, the manner 
of conduct or behavior of the individual thus attend- 
ing. The modern psychologists are recognizing this 
close relationship between knowledge, the result of 
attention, and action. In his ''Outlines of Psychol- 
ogy," Royce says there is no perception without 
action. In fact perception, seeing the thing face to 
face through the attentive act, and action, that is, 
conduct, behavior, appropriate response to adjust- 
ment, are one and the same thing. So that we know 
the thing only in terms of what we can do with it. 
The piano is an instrument on which certain musical 
effects can be produced, certain musical programs can 
be carried out. A desk is not a piece of furniture 
with certain standard measurements, but it is a piece 
of furniture that can be used in the attainment of 



ATTENTION AND CONDUCT 21 

certain ends, in the accomplishment of desirable work. 
And so we know an object of knowledge, the thing as 
it is called, not as a thing in itself, but through the 
use to which it can be put. Its effective behavior, 
the value of the thing as it now exists, is accounted 
for because it fulfills certain requirements of use. 

Furthermore, this close relationship of attention 
and conduct is shown in every activity of life, in 
the accomplishment of every task, in the attainment 
of every end, in the schoolroom, in the workaday 
affairs of life. We must know through attention, in 
general terms at least, the road before we can travel 
it. This is true of the student, the teacher, the car- 
penter, the farmer, the lawyer, — any one who gets 
anything worth while done. The getting it done can 
be accomplished only by attentive knowledge, how- 
ever partial, fragmentary, temporal and unsatis- 
factory for the long run, this knowledge may be at 
the outset. One's conduct is shaped and determined 
by his objects of attention; one's conduct is an abso- 
lute slave to his attention; it is affected, bound down 
by, and stands absolutely helpless before its tyrant, 
attention. However anxious the bicyclist may be 
that he reach his journey's end without a mishap, 
observation shows that he always inclines toward the 
destructive object when it first claims his attention, 
and only by sheer physical and mental strength, 
turns aside. Every one knows the force of an insist- 
ent idea which will not down. My roommate in- 
sisted that he was strong enough to break his watch 
chain. This idea to which he gave attention seemed 



22 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

to prey upon him, and the result of attention to this 
entirely unnecessary feat of strength was that in a 
comparatively short time the work had been done. 
The unworthy or the worthy deed is the legitimate 
result of the unworthy or the worthy object of atten- 
tion. Whoever thinks on higher things will advance 
toward them; whoever thinks on lower things, will go 
toward them. Here we see the significance of worthy 
ideals, high standards, character models, in the 
schoolroom and elsewhere, and we get a hint, but only 
a partial hint, of the disaster and ruin that follow in 
the wake of low ideals, bad conduct, and small ac- 
complishments as they are kept before the student. 

As the child thinketh in his heart, the man in 
after years thinketh in his heart and acts out in his 
life. Nothing short of the power that made him can 
save him from such a fate. It is not too much here 
to say that we attain salvation through attention and 
that we debase and debauch ourselves into damna- 
tion through attention. So the only hope of a cleaner 
and better life, of a more appropriate response, of 
efficient conduct, comes not primarily nor mainly 
through lamentations, but it comes through the power 
of attention. Fortunate is the man who, in the 
presence of objects or situations which are calculated 
to blast his life, can turn his mind and heart away, 
and fix them upon things that are calculated to 
order his conduct on the higher planes. But the 
multitude is not strong enough to win in this way; 
and so I have said to my students again and again 
that under such conditions the thing to do is simply 



ATTENTION AND CONDUCT 23 

to remember that there are better things and better 
ways; to remember that feet have been given us in 
order that we may run away, and that we must run 
until we have before our eyes and before our ears 
objects of attention that will turn our feet into 
wholesome and life-giving paths. The only hope for 
many a man and many a woman is that he or she 
stay away or go away. 

The most fortunate thing that any person can do 
who wishes to live an effective life, who wishes to 
deliver a blow for God and humanity that will be 
felt for all time, is to determine, in the formative, 
plastic years of his life, upon systems of attentive 
objects, — philosophy, literature, science, the com- 
panionship of the best men and women, — that these 
may be the stars to which he will hitch the slow- 
rolling wagon of his life. Only by following this or a 
similar program can one be sure that he will reach 
high levels in his conduct and that he will not travel 
the muddy roads on the low levels which lead to the 
swamps of immorality, disease and death. If we 
long for fine conduct, for well-ordered behavior, if we 
wish to live toward higher things and be strong, 
rather than to live toward lower things and be weak, 
this wish can be realized only as we meditate upon, 
think over, attend to the best that has been realized 
and the best that can be idealized. 



CHAPTER IV 
SUGGESTION AND CONDUCT 

We all recognize, to a degree at least, what an im- 
portant factor imitation is in the development of the 
child. I wish in this chapter to invite the attention 
of the reader to the importance of suggestion as the 
obverse of imitation. The child imitates what is 
suggested to it consciously or unconsciously by those 
with whom it lives. This is shown in all social fields. 
The child of English-speaking parents does not in- 
herit the English language nor even the specific skill 
to use the English language. It merely inherits the 
language tendency and in the course of time will ex- 
press itself by the use of some language. The prob- 
ability is that, being the child of English-speaking 
parents, it will speak the English language. This 
specific skill that it will in the course of time have 
attained is due to the English language suggestions 
received from its parents and other associates from 
infancy up. Had the child at the time of its birth or 
a few months afterward, though born of Enghsh- 
speaking parents, been placed in a German family in 
a German community, it would just as easily and 
effectively have used the German language instead of 
the English language, because it was subjected to the 

24 



SUGGESTION AND CONDUCT 25 

German language suggestions. Had it been placed 
in a French family it would for the same reason have 
developed the general language tendency into the 
particular French language skill. If a child is born 
and reared in a family in which only good language 
forms are used, it will, through the force of sugges- 
tion, imitate and use such language forms only. 
Vice versa, if the child is born and reared in a family 
that uses bad language forms, it will just as naturally 
come into the use, through suggestion, of these bad 
language forms. Its language conduct, so to speak, is 
therefore determined almost entirely by the sugges- 
tions that come to it through its language environ- 
ment. 

The effect of suggestion on conduct is as plainly 
shown in the field of religion and politics as any- 
where. Every child is born with the tendency to 
identify himself with social forms of one kind or 
another, — political, religious and so on. But he is 
not born with the tendency to be a Democrat, a 
Republican, a Prohibitionist or a Socialist. From his 
earliest childhood, however, he has been subjected to 
political suggestion, especially from his father. If 
these suggestions come from a Democrat, the strong 
probability is that the son will become a Democrat. 
If the suggestions come from a Republican, he will 
likewise be a Republican, and so on. This by no 
means implies that he will not later in life think for 
himself, invite new systems of suggestions through 
his reading and associations, and so probably change 
his political affiliation. But it does mean that, as a 



26 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

rule, the young son of a Democrat will be a Demo- 
crat and the young son of a RepubHcan will be a 
Republican, due in no way to inheritance but entirely 
to the system of political suggestions to which each 
has been subjected. 

In religious life, during the earlier and less thought- 
ful years, the sons and daughters of Methodists are 
Methodists; of Catholics are Catholics, and so on with 
all the church organizations. This again does not 
mean that the individual may not later invite new 
systems of religious suggestions and that he may not 
then change his church affihations. 

The great problem of the King Clothiers is to sug- 
gest by way of new fashions what the world shall 
wear. The result is that the world no longer wears 
out its clothes but discards them, being unable to 
resist the force of suggestion as it comes in the form 
of new styles and new fashions. Our young men and 
young women think that they might as well be dead 
as to wear headgear that is a season out of date. 

I use these simple illustrations, which must appeal 
to every one as being true, with the view of impress- 
ing upon the mind of the reader the very intimate 
relationships in all of life's organizations, in one's sum 
total of conduct, and suggestion. This is just as 
plainly seen in the narrower fields of behavior, so 
called. The young man of self-respect, worthy ideals 
and a pretty well defined plan of life, finds that his 
behavior, although it may never sink to the level of 
dissipation and debauchery and may never rise to the 
white table-land of consistent efficiency, is neverthe- 



SUGGESTION AND CONDUCT 27 

less varied, in harmony with the suggestions that 
come to him from the people among whom he may, 
at one time or another, be living. When he is among 
high-minded, efficient, virile people, without any pre- 
tense whatever and without any false front, he will 
react upon a high plane. His conduct will be the 
finest. He will be a prince among men. When he 
dwells among the commonplace; when his associates 
are those of narrow vision; when his companions are 
those whose dominating idea for the most part is 
selfishness; when his community is such as to admit of 
a degree of coarseness and vulgarity; without any in- 
tentional compromise on his part and all uncon- 
sciously to himself, through the force of the multitude 
of suggestions that come to him from these lower 
levels, he finds himself living the commonplace life, far 
beneath the altitudes at which he might be living. 

The effect of suggestion upon conduct is shown 
nowhere to better advantage than it is in the fife of 
the young person who has not yet chosen his fife's 
task. The vigorous, hungry-minded, clean, young 
farmer boy with small experience and narrow horizon 
will be carried away by the brilliant attorney when he 
hears him plead a case in court; he will decide in 
his mind and in his heart to be a lawyer. And when 
he sees a man that has fallen a victim of disease, 
snatched from the jaws of death by a well trained 
physician, he thrills with enthusiasm for the pro- 
fession of medicine and dedicates his life to the 
science of physic. In their turn a dozen callings 
appeal to him before he finally discovers himself, gets 



28 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

on his feet, has his bearings and hears the definite 
call to service. 

It is doubtful if anything gets such a hold, so in- 
sidiously and permanently, upon an individual early 
in life as do ideals of conduct. Through suggestion 
these ideals are very early ground into the child all 
unconsciously to himself. The farmer boy by his 
hard labor has saved a few dollars. On the Fourth 
of July his father gives him a holiday and grants 
him permission to take from his hard-earned savings, 
money for the day. The boy counts over his money 
again and again, takes a dime or a quarter, goes to 
town, has a good time and comes home at night with 
a sense of guilt, feeling that he is developing into 
a veritable spendthrift. In all probability neither 
his father nor his mother had told him that it was 
wrong for a child to spend a little money on such 
occasions. But during the first years of his life he 
has seen his father earning his money a dollar at a 
time and has observed economy on the part of his 
father in every movement; and without any teaching 
or discipline upon this point, the subtle suggestion 
has done its work, and the lesson of economy has 
gotten into the blood. On the other hand, the spoiled 
town child will destroy ten dollars' worth of fireworks 
on the Fourth of July and go to bed in the evening 
disgusted that he has had no chance to have a good 
time. He has fallen victim to the force of suggestion 
as it has come to him from neighbor children, and 
through the reckless spending of money as he has 
observed it in the city. 



SUGGESTION AND CONDUCT 29 

The effect of suggestion upon the conduct of an 
individual is probably nowhere more plainly seen 
than in the effect of the mob or the crowd upon an 
otherwise deliberate, well-behaved, law-abiding citizen. 
The best athletes in our colleges are results of the 
wise suggestions on the part of the coach or some 
other friend. Nothing buoys the athlete up so 
quickly, and causes him to live up to something more 
than himself, as does the incidental suggestion on the 
part of a friend that all eyes are upon him and that 
the fine thing is that they are not going to be dis- 
appointed. Nothing so brings the student to his feet 
as the remark casually made by the teacher that he 
always expects, as a matter of course, fine work from 
this student. Assume that your young friend has 
high ideals. If you know better, assume it anyhow! 
Talk to him as if you knew he had, and before you are 
aware these high ideals will be his and he will be 
worshipping and attaining them. The story of the 
wholesome effect of a clean community upon a young 
life remains to be told, and the story of the dis- 
astrous effect of the suggestion of a community of 
low ideals cannot be told. 

The largest problems of the teacher are not the 
ones that arise in mathematics or chemistry nor even 
the very large one that so often confronts him of 
meeting his financial obligations. The largest problem 
of the teacher is that of deciding the objects of sug- 
gestion that shall do their work on the children. The 
largest problem confronting a parent is not the problem 
of his professional or business calling, important as 



30 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

that may be. His largest problem is that of deciding 
on the things that his son and daughter shall see and 
hear. It is of comparatively small importance whether 
I live near my place of business or far away from it. 
If I live far away from it, the cars at small expense 
will carry me there; but the question of suprem- 
est importance is the community in which my chil- 
dren shall live, — what, during their plastic years, they 
shall see and hear — the children with whom they 
shall play, and the ideals of the parents of the children 
with whom they play. For in this particular the 
price demanded to redeem the children from the 
deadly effects of having attended to the small and 
the mean and the commonplace is a price so large 
that no man can pay it. 



CHAPTER V 
BELIEF AND CONDUCT 

There is a maxim which says that all the world 
loves a lover. This is true. It is just as true that all 
the world hates a hater, that the world disbelieves in 
a person who believes in nothing; that the world be- 
lieves in a believer, and that people take a positive 
attitude toward a positive character. All this is but 
saying that every mental attitude is catching and that 
to a very large degree each person creates the atmos- 
phere in which he lives. Not only does his own 
attitude determine his interpretation of the attitudes 
of others toward himself, but it determines what these 
attitudes shall be. Thus one becomes socially con- 
firmed in his own mental position or life attitudes. 
To the lover all things are lovely, to the hater all 
things are hateful; and he who has great practical faith 
in men and affairs will find everything contributing 
to the accomplishment of his ends. 

There is certainly nothing that one needs more 
than social confirmation. When Jesus was on the 
Mount of Transfiguration, Moses and Elias appeared 
to confirm the principle that He had been insisting 
upon when He said, ''Destroy this temple and in 
three days I will raise it up" namely, the principle 

31 



32 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

that death does not end all, that in the sense of 
extinction there is no death. Every worker in the 
world needs social confirmation, and he goes down 
from the Mount on which this social confirmation comes 
to him and takes up the workaday affairs of hfe renewed 
in vigor, reconsecrated in purpose. 

Not only is it true that he who believes has the 
social confirmation of the beUef of others in him and in 
his work, but it is also true that nothing contributes 
more completely to personal enlargement, to being 
actually equal to an undertaking, than does the belief 
that one possesses of being equal to it. Next to 
actual inabihty, nothing is so great a handicap as to 
believe that you cannot accomplish certain things. 
The student who does not have the abihty to master 
certain tasks is doubtless the most powerless of all 
students, but his near neighbor is the student who 
beheves that he is not able to do the tasks and who 
behaves accordingly. 

The mother said to her child who was trying to 
push the table about the room, "You cannot move the 
table; it is as large as you are." The child replied, 
"I can move the table; I am as large as it is." Half 
of the people in the world fail to accomplish their 
best because the task set is as large as they are. The 
other half outdo themselves because they believe that 
they are as large as the task set before them. We all 
appreciate what a wonderful force worthy ideals have 
in one's life. We all know that there is but one 
method whereby these ideals may be realized, and 
that there is certainly no greater dissipation than 



BELIEF AND CONDUCT 33 

worshiping ideals and yet not putting into practical 
use the one method whereby they may be realized, 
namely, the method of persistent, consistent applica- 
tion in their attainment. It is not, however, always 
recognized that aside from the force of interest but 
one thing is powerful enough to keep an individual at 
the task of realization, year in and year out, decade 
in and decade out, and that is the belief that the 
thing set is tremendously worth while and the belief 
in one's self as equal to the accomplishment of it. 

The great workers and the great pieces of work 
which they have accomplished can be explained in 
one way. It is true in politics, it is true in business, 
it is true in the church. 

My friend, as a boy, had the abiding feeling that 
the thing most worth while was public life, statesman- 
ship or politics, if you please. Without any definite 
reason for it, he had the abiding belief that this was 
the field in which he could realize himself most 
fully and render the largest service. He found his 
way to a literary degree at Harvard, to a legal degree 
at Columbia, and then to a very humble position in 
public official life. Promotion followed quickly upon 
promotion. Belief in the importance of the thing and 
of his being equal to accomplish it grew with his 
preparation and his performance. He has filled with 
credit to himself and with great benefit to our country 
numerous positions of responsibility and trust, and 
to-day is one of the largest and most potent factors in 
our public life. He lives at the capital of our nation, 
a monument of practical faith, or belief, in statesman- 



34 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

ship or politics as a mission, and in himself as the 
political missionary. 

A boy on account of delicate health was obliged to 
give up his work as a student in his middle teens, a 
thing in itself unfortunate. But he said that he was 
not made for nothing, that if he could not live his 
Ufe indoors, he would live it out of doors, and that 
out in the open he would deliver a blow that would 
count. He was interested in all of the institutions of 
civilization, but he was instinctively a business man; 
every fiber of his being tingled at the call of large en- 
terprises. He started in the humble position of clerk 
with an Iowa land firm. Promotion here followed 
rapidly upon promotion. It is a rare treat to hear 
this man enthuse over a business proposition or a 
business principle. He is no miser, — he is a generous 
man. There is no good cause which does not ehcit his 
sympathy, and many such causes have his good sup- 
port. He likes the game of business. To him there is 
probably nothing in all the world so fascinating as the 
material development and prosperity of the country. 
This man, standing upon a sane basis of practical 
faith, believing tremendously in the objective work of 
the world and in himself as one equal to do his share 
of it, has passed rapidly from one responsibihty to 
another, via the President's cabinet to the presidency 
of one of the largest business enterprises in the world. 
He is a living monument to practical faith or belief in 
the business world. 

A certain young clergyman was ordained a bishop 
and sent to the Orient to organize and develop the 



BELIEF AND CONDUCT 35 

interests of one of our great religious denominations. 
In person and by letter his friends throughout the 
country commiserated with him, but his reply soon 
taught them that they had not understood his motive. 
This young man in his inner vision saw an opportunity 
hidden from the eyes of others, and he believed in 
himself as divinely called to meet the opportunity. 
His seven years as bishop in the isles beyond the sea 
have become almost common history in the minds of 
the people, and there probably has never been since 
the days of our Master a soul surrendered more fully 
to the will of his Father. I know of no finer illustra- 
tion of self-forgetfulness, and of complete surrender to 
the call of the divine mission, than has been shown by 
this man in twice declining the invitation to one of 
the most dignified, honorable and responsible ecclesias- 
tical positions in America; preferring rather a life of 
toil, hardship and sacrifice, where every movement of 
his life would be an act of service, than a life of 
comparative ease, dignity and quiet, where his time 
necessarily would be given over more to routine and 
ceremonial. And so to-day, as a comparatively young 
man. Bishop Brent lives in the Philippine Islands, a 
living monument of practical faith or belief in the 
world of religious forces; and even he who runs may 
read enough of this life to inspire him to larger tasks 
and larger faithfulness in the performance of them. 

These are illustrations of the principle from only 
three fields; the behavior, the conduct of life in each 
instance, has been determined by the belief that the 
individual has had in the thing and in himself. 



36 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

Furthermore, it is true that he who beheves is the 
only one who can speak with authority. He only 
risks; therefore, he alone experiences and knows. 
He only who believes in an enterprise will invest in it 
and thereby gain knowledge of it. He only who be- 
lieves in goodness will be good, and therefore he alone 
can speak with authority on goodness. He only who 
believes in God will experience God. He who believes 
not in goodness is inehgible to speak upon goodness. 
He who believes not in God speaks with no degree of 
authority whatever upon things that pertain to the 
kingdom of God. Waiving handicaps, accidents and 
so forth, one's work is large and valuable in propor- 
tion to his practical faith; and one's practical conduct, 
his hfe of application, is directly determined by such 
belief and is proportionate to it. 



CHAPTER VI 
FEAR AND CONDUCT 

In this chapter I wish to show the sinfulness of 
being afraid. It is a sin to be less than one may be. 
The man who is not as good and as strong as he 
might be is a sinner, even if he has never committed 
any positive offense. There is probably nothing that 
leads more quickly to weakness, to the destruction of 
power, than does fear. 

The healthy person ought to be ashamed to be 
afraid of anything. The evil effects of fear are plainly 
shown in the physical life, in the pallor of the cheek, 
in the trembling of every muscular fiber in the body, 
in the parched mouth, in the disturbance of the vital 
processes, in the temporary powerlessness of one or 
more of the sense organs, and in the actual poison- 
ing of the blood. The more superficial and objective 
of these signs are known to all, but it is not generally 
known that as a result of intense fear the sense of 
hearing has been multiplied a hundred or even a 
thousand fold, but such is the case. And it is not 
generally known that an excessively frightened animal 
or human being during the process of digestion will 
secrete an amount of poison which when extracted will 
kill small animals. In intense fear the body is to a 

37 



38 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

degree paralyzed and poisoned, and it is doubtful if 
one is ever so sound physically after the experience of 
intense fear as he otherwise would have been. The 
discoloration of one's hair in a comparatively short 
time, due, the physiologists tell us, to fear, is com- 
monly known, and is illustrative of the ruinous effects 
of fear upon the organism. 

The disastrously weakening effect of fear is seen in 
the mental Hfe as well as in the physical life. It is 
nothing less than temporary insanity, and whoever is 
in a position of authority and discipline should know 
this. The havoc that is wrought in the school and in 
the home through fear is too great to be credible. 
I am not here suggesting a program of soft pedagogy. 
On the contrary, I would exercise the ordinance of the 
laying on of hands in the home or in the school when 
it seems wise to do so, but I should be careful never 
to subject the child to intense fear. For the child 
who is frightened is always subnormal, and his per- 
formances while in this state are always partial and 
unsatisfactory. He may rally and do better in the 
future than he did in the past because, though the 
disciplinarian cannot realize the baneful effects of fear, 
the child does not care for the re-experience, and so 
improves his conduct. But the improvement is not 
the direct result of the fear which the child has experi- 
enced. His improved performances are possible in 
spite of the depletion of physical vigor and mental 
energy and not because of them. 

We have this same point of weakness through fear, 
or the sinfulness of being afraid, illustrated in the 



FEAR AND CONDUCT 39 

spiritual life. Through the centuries conscientious 
people have professed to believe that first things are 
first, have been willing to put first things first and 
have been correct in their views as to what things are 
first, yet probably the least progress in any phase of 
human life has been in the spiritual life. The people 
forget that they are the children of a King; they for- 
get that, inefficient as they are, they are nevertheless 
the best the world has. They falter, they fear, they 
go forward to the performance of their duty as if 
they were afraid of God and man rather than as if 
they were performing a labor of love. The brightest 
day that could dawn for religion would be the day in 
which our sons and our daughters would love the best, 
worship it, believe in it, and with swift feet would 
run gladly on missions of mercy and service. The 
darkest day in the religious life has been the day when 
the people betook themselves from the world, cowered, 
were faint-hearted and worshiped God as a terrible 
God and not as a Heavenly Father. 

The successful business man is the one who sees 
his way more or less clearly, who believes in the 
thing he is about to undertake, and who believes him- 
self equal to the undertaking. He is a man who 
enters the business arena with firm and elastic step, 
with a high head, with assurance and thoughtfulness 
written on his brow. It is the business man who is 
willing to risk who endures. The business world 
stands aside for such a man, and his road to success 
is broad and straight. 

No coach can win games with a team that is afraid 



40 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

that it will be defeated. And the team has never been 
found good enough to win games when the coach is 
afraid that it is going to be defeated. This is true of 
all competition — debating, oratory. As well close 
the doors of the educational institution, much better 
do so, than to put at the head of the institution a 
man or a woman who fears that the young men and 
the young women will not finally do great things. 
The stamp of fear is the stamp of death. 

In the schoolroom nothing contributes so certainly 
to confusion, misunderstanding, misconduct, and to 
impossible situations, as does a lack of self-control and 
an absence of poise on the part of the principal or the 
teacher. Nothing contributes so certainly to quiet, 
application, efficiency, obedience, community interest, 
high ideals, individual and institutional self-respect, 
as do perfect poise and fearlessness on the part of the 
one who is called master. Nothing can happen to the 
institution or to the community of so great value as 
the coming into it of a few young people whose lives 
are clean, whose ideals are high, whose attainments 
are correspondingly large, and who move forward to 
the attainment of much larger things, perfectly fear- 
less of any one or anything — not the braggart, not 
the bully, but one who has nothing to fear because he 
has been his best and done his best. 

Each one of us started with an inheritance for 
which we were in no sense responsible. The only 
thing to fear is that we may not reahze upon our in- 
heritance. Every one who has done markedly great 
things in the world has been a man or a woman who 



FEAR AND CONDUCT 41 

has feared not. Not only the mean work but the 
small work has been done by cowards. No coward 
ever did a thing that was worth while, and no brave- 
hearted man who has attempted it has failed to do 
something that is worth while. All literature, all 
secular and sacred history, all contemporary observa- 
tion confirm the principle that fear depletes human 
energy, physical, mental and spiritual, and that it is a 
mark of physical or mental weakness to be afraid. 



CHAPTER VII 
SELF-RESPECT AND CONDUCT 

The belief that one is equal to great things is one 
of the prerequisites of the accomplishment of them. 
Whoever regards himself as possessing positive, effi- 
cient characteristics has a legitimate basis for a 
degree of self-respect. Whoever regards himself as 
inefficient, whose self-respect is low, undertakes small 
things or nothing, and the performance is conse- 
quently of small value. 

One of the greatest stimulations that comes to a 
human being is, as I have suggested in a former 
chapter, that which comes by way of social confirma- 
tion. The uplift that comes to the student because 
his teacher or his mates believe in him is invaluable. 
Many a worker has done less than he is capable of 
doing because he lacked this social confirmation; and 
many a one has outdone himself because just at the 
right time the appropriate social confirmation was 
given. No one becomes so weak that his power may 
not be increased by such confirmation, and no one 
becomes so powerful that he does not need it. 

Former successes also make for added increment of 
power. The knowledge that one has done well is a 
stimulation of greatest value. To know that one has 

42 



SELF-RESPECT AND CONDUCT 43 

not done illy, that one has not taken certain mis- 
steps, that one is free from certain habits, — success 
along all these lines means power on the part of the 
individual in the future. The bare knowledge even 
of one's opportunity to prepare for great things is an 
increment of power to one who has taken advantage 
of these opportunities. Not only the power that has 
been developed in the preparation, but a man's mere 
knowledge that he is college bred, aside from the 
facts that he may have gained while pursuing his 
college course, — this bare fact means much to the 
individual. 

All of these things — social confirmation, former 
successes, the mere knowledge of the opportunities to 
get ready — contribute to success because they have in 
them, in some subtle, indescribable, appreciative way, 
the increments of power, and whoever possesses them 
has a much larger prospect than the one who does 
not. But none of these things are of first impor- 
tance. Why is it that one man succeeds and another 
does not? The people believe in both; both are re- 
spectable; both have had the best opportunities for 
preparation. People say they do not know why the 
one goes forward and the other does not. 

I should like to make a suggestion, if not indeed an 
explanation, which, it seems to me, strikes a vital 
point. It is this: a fine self-respect, the knowledge 
of one's own high motives, of one's unselfish purposes 
and the consciousness of one's clean life, a perfect 
willingness for the X-ray to be turned on, perfect 
indifference as to who knows, perfect frankness, open- 



44 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

ness and completeness of action — these things make for 
power in their possessor as no amount of culture, re- 
finement, education or experience can do, and these 
are some of the elements of self-respect. Those who 
do not possess fine self-respect eliminate the founda- 
tion upon which every one must stand when he de- 
livers his blow, and with the foundation tottering and 
gone the blow is ineffective. The power that human 
beings have exercised in this world is power through 
their self-respect. 

Many a man, for example, has fallen short of com- 
plete self-respect because he has fallen short of com- 
plete truthfulness. It is a hard but nevertheless true 
saying that but few people live and speak the plain 
truth at all times. They quibble in their speech and 
in their conduct. Such a deficiency may be known 
only to him who is thus deficient, but he moves in a 
winding path and not in a straight line. 

Many men of good repute fall short of complete 
self-respect because they fall short of complete chastity 
and purity. And there is nothing in all the world 
that tends, all unconsciously to the individual, to 
throw the weakness of indigo blue instead of the 
strength of iron red into the blood so much as does 
this shortage. Without knowing it such a one will 
go forward with a faltering step. 

Many men fall short of complete self-respect be- 
cause they fall short of complete appUcation. They 
know that the opportunity is theirs, they have heard 
the call and accepted it, but in retrospect they find 
that they have shirked their work, and the fine power 



SELF-RESPECT AND CONDUCT 45 

that emanates from the consciousness of having met 
from hour to hour every task squarely and fully is 
gone. 

Many men fall short of complete self-respect 
because they have fallen short of complete poise. 
What is more calculated to bring disgust, shame, dis- 
couragement and the consciousness of inefficiency 
than the knowledge that one has been stampeded or 
excited or frightened into conduct that is unbecoming 
a man? And what is so conducive to a high degree 
of self-respect as is the consciousness that under all 
conditions of life one has had his balance, that he has 
maintained his poise, that he has been master of his 
own thoughts and of his own movements? In every 
situation of life, passion is ruinous to the individual 
and makes great work impossible, while on the other 
hand nothing contributes more completely to fullness 
of life and largeness of work than does the personal 
power which one realizes in himself through poise. 

If one wishes to be a power in the world, standing 
out in the open at midday, doing the work of a grown 
man, if one abhors the day of weak things, of small 
work, of inefficiency and of shame, let him under- 
stand that he must travel the roads of truthfulness, 
chastity, application, justice, poise, and indeed all the 
roads of personal and social virtue to the end, that 
only by so doing can he have that fine self-respect 
which is the greatest power in the world for individual 
achievement. 



CHAPTER VIII 
IDEALS AND CONDUCT 

Nothing shows so plainly and nothing is revealed 
so unmistakably as one's ideals in his work. The 
value of the work, of the life, of the conduct of an in- 
dividual is determined very largely by his ideals and 
his motives. The artist stands before the canvas, 
brush in hand, but the value of his work to the world 
cannot be estimated until his ideal, or the motive for 
his work, is known. The same is true of the sculptor. 
By the hundreds young men are annually entering the 
profession of law. The value of their work is not 
at all determined by the profession which they enter. 
Probably no larger service has ever been rendered to 
the world than that which has been rendered by the 
well-trained lawyer with high ideals of service and 
worthy motives of life; and probably no one has 
hindered the progress of civil institutions more than 
has the equally briUiant lawyer whose ideals have been 
low and whose motives, unworthy. 

Who can estimate the value of the service to man- 
kind that has been rendered by the well-trained 
physician whose motive has been to serve humanity 
and whose ideal has been the abundant physical life 
for human kind? And who can estimate the misery 
and death that have followed in the wake of phy- 

46 



IDEALS AND CONDUCT 47 

sicians whose ideals were personal prosperity and 
whose methods consisted in coddling and deceiving 
the public? The value even of the work of the min- 
istry is no less determined by the ideal possessed by 
the one who enters this highest of all callings. To 
him who sees the largeness of the opportunity, who 
thrills to the call of large service, there is no field 
which offers such large and manifold opportunities as 
does the ministry. But for him who enters the 
ministry with the ideal and motive of ease and com- 
parative luxury, of enjoying a degree of leadership 
among the people, there probably is not a value 
small enough to express the worth of his work. To 
one who has learned to think not only in counties and 
states but who is large enough to think in continents, 
the work of the missionary looms up large and im- 
portant. The value of the service rendered by such 
a one is beyond all telling, but my friend recites an 
instance of a young man who longed to be a mission- 
ary and to go into the middle of China where the foot 
of man had never trod. My friend is right in classi- 
fying the motive here as romance and not as religion, 
and certainly the religious work accomplished by a per- 
son with such an ideal would hardly be worth reciting. 
The value of the services rendered by a teacher is 
determined almost entirely in the light of his ideal, 
his motive in his work. Teachers of comparatively 
small training have done great work because they 
were seeking right ends; and teachers of the finest 
training have sometimes done work of little or no 
value, if indeed they have not done positive injury, 



48 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

because they were headed nowhere and seeking noth- 
ing in particular, unless indeed it were some selfish, 
personal end. My blacksmith friend, who sometimes 
invites me to his shop to follow him at his work, is a 
skillful performer. He is known far and wide, and 
he is greatly admired and loved by all. This is not 
so much due to the fact that he is an artist, although 
he is in his profession, as it is to his fine motives and 
to his ideal. I have never had the pleasure of visit- 
ing his shop without being taught some new turn in 
his work. He has the same joy in nailing the shoe to 
the hoof of the horse that the musician has in render- 
ing a concerto. No wonder that this uncultured, un- 
couth, horny-handed person of an otherwise unknown 
community has had shipped to his shop the finest 
racing horses in the country. 

The psychological relation of ideals and conduct is 
plainly shown in this, that whether a man behaves 
according to his best or according to his worst, he 
must have an ideal standard of behavior. Biography 
contributes largely to such a standard. Let the boy 
read over and over again the story of Washington, of 
Franklin, of Livingstone, of Savonarola, of Jesus of 
Nazareth, and he will have ideal standards of conduct 
that will bring him to his best. On the other hand, let 
the boy delve into the vile stuff that is gotten out by the 
ton daily in our country, in which is depicted the low, 
the mean and the groveUng, and the force of gravity in 
his life will become such that not all the other forces 
combined can save him from the downward road. 

Not only is an ideal standard of conduct necessary 



IDEALS AND CONDUCT 49 

but an ideal road to travel in realizing this standard 
is necessary. In general outline, if not indeed in 
detail, the road must be seen stretching on ahead of 
the young person who is to travel it. But the ma- 
terials that go to make up the ideals are the materials 
that have been experienced. The traveler must 
furthermore idealize himself as now traveling the 
road. The significance of this is shown in the fact 
that one who is physically incapacitated is unable to 
will to undertake the task. The armless student who 
sits on the bleachers watching his team go down to 
defeat in baseball has his standard of victory and 
knows the road the other nine men must travel to 
attain this standard, but he is unable to will to travel 
the road himself. He can only wish that he had 
arms that he might will to help in the contest. The 
student who has a hopelessly falsetto voice, who is 
intensely loyal to his college, who would pay any 
price that his institution might win in the oratorical 
contest — can only wish that he had a good speak- 
ing voice that he might will to do so. We see here 
how very closely related are human wealth, the abun- 
dant life, ideals and conduct. Without ideals there 
can be no effective conduct. Without the abundant 
life whereby one may will there can be no efficient 
conduct, for all conduct is objective willing, the last 
end of will being to get it done. The great concern 
then is, that from early childhood the material for 
worthy ideals of conduct and the opportunity for real- 
izing these ideals, should be at the disposal of all our 
children. 



CHAPTER IX 
MODELS AND IDEALS 

I HOPE that in the preceding chapter I have made 
clear the close relationship that exists between ideals 
and conduct. I desire to show in this chapter that 
the relation existing between ideals and models is 
just as close and important. Conduct, as has been 
seen, depends directly upon ideals. No less do ideals 
depend directly upon models. Ideals are the subjec- 
tive answer to models, as the objective suggestion. 

In a little town which I visited recently, the hotel 
proprietor was stampeded because of the large num- 
ber of guests which applied for lodging. He was pre- 
pared to take care of three and would accommodate 
the entire company of five if they would ''double up." 
In the course of the conversation he said that he 
"reckoned his town was one of the best towns in the 
country." He also gave us the valuable and inter- 
esting information that he had been born in that 
community sixty years ago and that he had traveled 
to the extreme boundaries of the county, clinching 
his view that his town was one of the most prosper- 
ous in the country with the very meaningful remark 
that he did not know a town that had so much room 
around it. His idea of a town and of a public hostelry 

50 



MODELS AND IDEALS 51 

was the exact counterpart of the models to which he 
had been exposed all his life. 

The ideal of womanhood that the girls of the 
Chinese empire have is a life of drudgery and burden- 
bearing. It cannot be otherwise with the models 
that they have before their eyes from birth day 
to death day. In the city of Hongkong Chinese 
women may be seen carrying the building materials 
up the winding paths for hundreds of palatial resi- 
dences on the mountain tops. A few years ago I 
was told that in the city of Hongkong there were 
but six horses, and these were race horses. The 
owners would not think of working these fine animals 
because this heavy, coarse, manual labor could be 
accomplished by the Chinese women. 

My young, inexperienced, vulgar country acquaint- 
ance who inherited a little property expressed the 
fear that he would be ruined by his fortune. His 
father had been the owner of one of the largest farms 
in the township. Many a young man has transacted 
more business in a day than this bumpkin's entire 
inheritance represented, without having felt that he 
was a captain of industry. The young farmer had 
his ideals of wealth and business determined by the 
models that had been before him. His ideal of a 
fortune was the .ownership of a few acres. 

A certain famous zoologist spent months traversing 
southern streams to find the missing connection be- 
tween two species of fish. When he saw a fish that 
seemed to meet the demand he went into the water, 
clothes and all, after it, and was rewarded for the 



52 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

months of labor he had spent in searching for this 
specimen. He prepared it with his usual care, and 
that it might be preserved, put it into his alcohol 
jar. The native who had accompanied him day after 
day and month after month looked on in amaze- 
ment. When he saw the specimen go into the 
alcohol jar he remarked, "Why, man, that is good to 
eat!" It had never occurred to him that there was 
a higher use to which a single fish could be put than 
that of food, and his ideal of the use of the fish had 
been determined entirely by the models of use that 
had been before him all his life. 

The greatest ideals that have been born, and the 
highest standards that have been erected in America 
within the last hundred years, have been in the col- 
leges and universities. And many of the smallest 
ideals and the narrowest convictions that have been 
ground into our people within the last hundred years 
have been in some of the colleges and universities of 
our country. I can think of nothing that is so con- 
ducive to small ideas and low ideals as an educational 
institution handicapped for resources, with indiffer- 
ently trained teachers who believe in salvation by 
elimination, who are good because they are going to 
die and not because they are going to live. There is 
nothing in the world, in the slums of a great city or 
in the isolation of remote country life, that is so well 
calculated to result in narrowness, stupidity and gen- 
eral inefficiency as such models of professed leadership. 

When man has as his ideal of service "Git a plenty 
while you're a-gittin," everything about him may 



MODELS AND IDEALS 53 

prosper. Nothing within him prospers. Everything 
he controls prospers, except himself. Because of the 
prosperity of his taxable property he serves as a 
model for many of the boys of his community. The 
result is that following upon such a model as an 
ideal, the undertakings of the boys of that com- 
munity, within the course of a comparatively few 
years, may be prosperous, but it will be a prosperity 
bought at the fearful price of human life. On the 
other hand, whenever a man has as his ideal the 
bigness of human life and couples with that the will- 
ingness, the eagerness to help raise it, he makes a 
mighty contribution to the human wealth of the 
world. These are the models that result in the ideals 
which alone can save the world. Every century, 
every generation must have a few people who are 
willing to make themselves the fittest to live so that 
they may be worthy to die, and those who are willing 
to invest all that they are and all that they have to 
the general uplift of humankind. The man who is 
doing this in Manila is elevating the general level 
of humankind the world around. The man who is 
doing this in Greenland is doing it no less. 

Conduct depends upon ideals, but I hope that it 
is coming to be clear to the reader that no less do 
models determine almost entirely, in the lives of most 
people, the ideals that they have. A boy can hardly 
escape from worshiping the god of gold if his neigh- 
bors are bent only upon money-making and are suc- 
cessful in their efforts. A young person can hardly 
escape from worshiping the god of learning, striving 



54 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

after the ideal of knowledge, if his parents and 
his neighbors are devoting their lives to successful 
research and study. With the greatest difficulty 
does one turn aside to the realization of large things 
in himself and in others who has had before him con- 
stantly from childhood those who have held positions 
of honor and responsibility, and who continue to be 
appointed or elected to such positions. The model 
that is set before the sons of pubhc men, especially if 
those public men are successful, is such as to estab- 
lish in the heart and mind of the son the ideal, the 
desire, the longing for fame and notoriety, and some- 
times, let us hope, a Hfe of usefulness in this same 
field. Now we have passed the era of stupidity, when 
we look with suspicion upon the one who succeeds in 
his financial career, in the career of a scholar or in the 
profession even of clean politics, but we have not yet 
entered the era in which we realize as we should that 
these are not comprehensive ideals and so cannot be 
comprehensive, satisfactory models for our people. 
They are not ends, they are means, and only par- 
tial means; and well will it be for our country and 
for the world when our sons and our daughters may 
look in whatever direction they will, in history, in 
literature, in the business world, in the school, in the 
church, in the state, and find models of fine living, 
stirring models of the abundant life. How large will 
be the new era when we have grown men in the pul- 
pits, living men at the teachers' desks, vigorous, clean- 
lived men in our places of business, God-fearing men, 
with good digestions, absolutely free from selfish mo- 



MODELS AND IDEALS 55 

tives, in our places of public trust. With a decade 
of such models who can venture to guess the trans- 
formation that would be made in the ideals of our 
sons and daughters in all their life reactions? The 
most important thing before an institution, be it 
the home, the school, the church or the state, is 
the living model of the abundant life. The respon- 
sibility of being such a model should weigh so heavily 
upon every man and woman who holds a place, even 
of smallest leadership, that he can have no peace until 
he has attained the abundant life to the highest 
degree possible to himself, 



CHAPTER X 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF AN ABIDING IDEAL 

Not every one who appreciates the transforming 
effect of ideals upon Hfe reahzes how great the demand 
is for steadfastness of purpose. Going in a straight 
line is seldom found in the performances of a human 
being, but it is the thing greatly to be desired on the 
part of every one who aspires to meet large tasks and 
accomplish them in a satisfactory manner. So it is 
important that one should have what I am pleased to 
call here the abiding ideal. No one who prospers can 
fail to have many and changing ideals through a long, 
successful Hfetime. Such a person has many changes 
and unique and peculiar upheavals in his life, and 
these are marked by new motives and new powers. 
Childhood has its humors and its caprices, its ever- 
changing desires and hungerings and thirstings. 
Youth has its hopes, aspirations and ideals of undis- 
covered regions and unaccomplished tasks. Young 
manhood has its visions, swears allegiance to ideals of 
strength, valor and courage. Mature Hfe has its 
visions and sometimes its dreams of the fullness of 
life and unselfish service. Not less do conditions 
change than does the individual himself. The world 
moves. New opportunities are continually stretch- 

56 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF AN ABIDING IDEAL 57 

ing before the one who has his eyes developed to see 
them. New problems arise on every hand. The 
greatest thing the world has to present to the child 
has become of second-rate importance when he at- 
tains the years of youth. The greatest cry of the 
people that the youth hears is lost and forgotten 
during the years that he is pressing into young man- 
hood. So rapidly does the world move, so strenuous 
is modern life, so complex and so rapidly changing 
are the institutions of men, that the largest call that 
comes in the years of young manhood is a faint 
whisper as compared with the tremendous call that 
comes from the complicated, hustling world to this 
same man when he has attained the years of maturity. 
Young men to-day who are willing to serve have a 
thousand battles to wage in the modern city which 
were undreamed of and unguessed by their fore- 
fathers. The demand, for example, for sanitary engi- 
neers in the great cities of our country and of the 
world cannot be met by young men who are prepared 
to do the work. The person who takes the first steps 
on the road of life, through childhood into youth, 
young manhood and mature life, with ever-changing 
ideals from within and ever-changing demands from 
without, cannot be certain that he will go forward in 
the straight line of efficiency, cannot be sure which of 
these ideals is a worthy one and which of these de- 
mands is a real one. There must be an over-ideal, if 
you please. There must be a great purpose in life 
compared to which these ever-changing, legitimate 
ideals and demands are but as corollaries. 



58 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

The immortal Lincoln is beloved as no other presi- 
dent of our country has been. He was probably the 
most gentle, unique, courageous, man-loving, God- 
fearing, God-directed, self-made character that this 
country has ever produced. The blow that he de- 
hvered for the state and humankind is one whose 
effects are now only beginning to be felt; and time 
will serve only to emphasize and put upon his work a 
truthful interpretation. He had the highest and most 
lofty ideals that a president of his day could enter- 
tain. They were ideals that pertained to national 
affairs. But the world moves, and time has wrought 
changes such as our martyred president could not 
have imagined. Life is becoming complex at a fear- 
ful rate. The problems that demanded high ideals on 
the part of President Lincoln have been solved. New 
problems have arisen. The largest questions that 
confronted President Roosevelt were questions of in- 
ternational relationships. He did his work well. He 
was a man of ideals and a man who had the ability 
to reahze upon them. But the thing that I am 
insisting upon here is that Mr. Lincoln had his set of 
ideals for his time merely as corollaries to the abiding 
ideal, to the over-ideal of service, and that Mr. 
Roosevelt hkewise had his set of ideals always in 
submission to this same abiding ideal. 

Our grandfathers and grandmothers had their ideals 
of home hfe — beautiful and beneficent. No stronger 
influence has ever gone into the hfe of the child than 
that which was generated about the family table 
with the lamp in the center, with father, mother and 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF AN ABIDING IDEAL 59 

the children gathered about it during long winter 
evenings. Our scientists, bent upon improvement, 
have put an end to all that. The beauty of fam- 
ily intercourse has been exchanged for the modern 
inconveniences. Then, about a common center, by 
the one stove or open fireplace the evenings were 
spent, in the expression of family hopes, joys and 
sorrows. But the furnace has come and the ten-room 
house is uniformly heated; the electric light has come 
and the same house is uniformly lighted; each child 
has his own room, and the members of the family say 
good night to one another on leaving the dinner 
table. What held the family together in the early 
days? Not a better conception of life, but the over- 
ideal of love and duty performed toward one another. 
What holds the family together to-day? Exactly the 
same abiding ideal. Without it family life would be 
a misnomer. This abiding ideal of love, of service, in 
whatever clime, under whatever conditions, ramifies to 
the remotest rooms even of a castle. The child is not 
saved to the best with which he was endowed be- 
cause of any procession of high ideals alone, but 
because held up to him and lived before him, under 
all the vicissitudes of fortune, is the over-ideal of the 
abundant life, of worthy manhood. 

During my boyhood days the country boy would 
have been hopelessly shiftless and worthless if he had 
rambled about his township so as to be familiar with 
the people who lived on the borders of it. But with 
our turnpikes, automobiles and electric railways, the 
boy to-day would be hopelessly stupid if his township 



60 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

or even his county were not his community. The 
world moves. One's ideals shift, the geography of 
life's situations changes in relief, contour and prod- 
ucts. The only hope for the boy to-day whose com- 
munity is the county is the hope of the boy twenty 
years ago whose community was his school district, — 
the possession of an abiding ideal. The principle 
strongly enforced by an explicit rule twenty years ago 
would be violated by the application of the same rule 
to-day. The friends to whom we were anchored in 
childhood and youth are gone, or else they cannot or 
will not understand. The interests to which we were 
anchored are gone. Our ideals have varied from 
childhood through life. How shall we be saved from 
drifting? What can prevent human life from being 
wafted hither and thither, being subject to continual 
inner transformations and outer stimulations? 

There is but one hope, and it is found in. the abid- 
ing ideal, ''Seek ye first the kingdom of God." I 
will not stop here to define what that is. The king- 
dom of God is as meaningful to the individual as the 
individual himself is full of meaning. Seek ye first 
the kingdom and the other things will be added. 
The changes, internal and external, are the shadows. 
The hope of the consistent, efficient life is found in 
the possession of an ideal that changeth not. 



CHAPTER XI 
THE SCHOOL AND IDEALS 

In former chapters I have endeavored to show how 
prominent and important are ideals in the forming of 
efficient character. I wish in this chapter to show 
how large a share the school has in determining what 
these ideals shall be and therefore how large the re- 
sponsibility is which rests upon the school in this 
matter. The home is the foundation of society, and 
if it fails in its basic work nothing can compensate for 
this failure. But no other institution has the oppor- 
tunity that the school possesses for raising up before 
the children worthy ideals of life and of character; 
and no other institution offers as a rule such ideal 
conditions under which the children may reahze upon 
their ideals, for there is a degree of organization and 
of systematic procedure in even the poorest schools. 

Every one who reads this will remember the ideals 
that were instilled into his life during his school 
days. It was in the reading class, as a boy, that I 
had impressed upon me the fine ideal of faithfulness 
in the story of Peter Lenox and the turnip patch, and 
in the story of Casablanca. From the days of those 
reading lessons to the present time it would have 
been a Uttle more difficult for me to have been un- 

61 



62 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

faithful to a task than it would have been if I had not 
been inspired by those examples of faithfulness. It 
was here also that I got my first ideals of courage, to 
do one's duty under all circumstances. The story of 
the English lad who declined to open the gate that 
the Duke of Wellington and his companions might 
pass through a cultivated field on a hunting trip 
brought me to my feet. And when the boy waved 
his hat and cried, "Hooray! hooray! I have done 
what Napoleon could not do; I have kept back the 
Duke of WelHngton!" a permanent mark was made 
upon my boyish life. From that day to this it would 
have been more difficult to have scared or stampeded 
me into an act of cowardice than before that time. 
History offers large opportunities for instiUing ideals 
of patriotism and loyalty. There is nothing better 
calculated to stir a young American to the emotion of 
patriotism and loyalty than the recital of the suffer- 
ings and endurance of the American Revolutionary 
women, whose heroism yet remains to be sung by 
generations unborn. I shall never forget the thrill of 
a new-born patriotism that I experienced as I first 
read that at the close of the American Revolutionary 
War Washington might have been crowned king, but 
that he declined the crown. I had followed his 
career with great care and interest from the days 
when he was a young surveyor, through the French 
and Indian War, through the Revolutionary War, and 
the struggle afterward for a satisfactory scheme of 
government. I had begun to realize that he exer- 
cised an influence over the people which would claim 



THE SCHOOL AND IDEALS 63 

their allegiance and their following wherever he 
might choose to go. And this one act of his brought 
me at once to a higher plane of patriotism and loy- 
alty, a plane which I fear I might not have attained 
had it not been that in the name of patriotism 
Washington, after he had gained all, laid it all down. 
There must be a finer and truer patriotism and loyalty 
in the minds and hearts of our young people when 
they read of the services of President J. Q. Adams; 
how, after he had been elevated to the position of 
highest honor and responsibility in the gift of the 
American people, he was willing, for the sake of ser- 
vice to his country, to accept a less conspicuous post 
and to represent his home district for a number of 
years in the national House of Representatives. 
There is hardly a lesson in history that does not lend 
itself to high ideals of life and conduct with especial 
reference, of course, to one's obligation to the insti- 
tutions in the midst of which he lives. 

But no other department of school work offers such 
fine and numerous opportunities for impressing the 
young with high ideals as the department of liter- 
ature. For an ideal of clean, unbiased, absolute 
justice, where the wheel of life makes a complete 
turn, give the student ''King Lear." And when you 
wish your student to realize that a man must reap 
whatever he sows, which is itself a lesson in justice, 
let him read "Hamlet." The critics may never be 
able to answer the question. Was Hamlet mad? but 
there is no question in the mind of any one who reads, 
that if Hamlet was not mad he was on the verge of 



64 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

madness. Madness is the inevitable outcome of such 
an experience. The story of ideals in the Hterary 
world is so well known that it need not be retold 
here. It serves, however, to good purpose in empha- 
sizing the close relationship between the school and 
ideals, and the responsibihty of the school in determi- 
ning the ideals of the students. 

In art the school offers an opportunity for develop- 
ment at comparatively small expense. Copies of the 
finest works of art can be placed in the halls and on 
the walls of the schoolroom and all unconsciously to 
the student he will gain true artistic ideals. The ugly 
and the grotesque will in the course of time become 
painful to him if he has been living in the presence of 
fine art. He will no longer measure the value and 
beauty of a picture by the amount of paint or by the 
square yard. 

But, after all, the greatest chance that the school 
offers for worthy ideals in the lives of young people is 
that which comes through personal, daily contact 
with the teacher. No historic story, no literary 
character, no work of art, nor all of these combined, in 
the long run make for or against the student's best 
development so completely and permanently as can 
the life of the teacher in a comparatively short time. 
The best cure for curvature of the spine and round 
shoulders is a young teacher who comes into the com- 
munity with broad shoulders, high head and elastic 
step, capable of feats of strength and endurance. 
The doctors have their place, but the presence of 
such a teacher in a community for one year will do 



THE SCHOOL AND IDEALS 65 

more to make the physical life straight and strong than 
all the bandages and splints and shoulder braces in the 
doctors' offices. Are the children slovenly, untidy, 
unwashed? Let a healthy, clean-minded, efficient 
young man or woman come before these children for 
one year as teacher, and the dispenser of toothbrushes 
and soap will surely find his business increasing. 
The vast majority of people, especially of young 
people, speak the truth, but also the vast majority of 
them do not speak the complete truth. Let a young 
man or woman come into the community to teach 
school who has ideals of truthfulness, who tells the 
truth, the complete truth, who tells it freely, without 
any hesitation whatever, and who lives it as freely 
and fully as he speaks it; ideals of truth will be born 
into the lives of the young people which could come 
to them in no other way. 

Let this young teacher be a master of the subjects 
that he teaches and let him be skillful in the presen- 
tation of them, and the children will get an insight 
into the meaning of efficiency and will have ideals of 
mastery such as they have not had and under other 
conditions could not have had. As the result of the 
coming of this strong, complete, truthful, efficient 
young person into the community, the children and 
their parents will come to have an ideal of the abun- 
dant life which after all is the end of living. We 
should not, however, forget that there are five insti- 
tutions of civilization, five great organized agencies of 
civilized life, and that the school is only one of these. 
We will therefore not hold the school responsible for 



66 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

all the shortcomings and misdemeanors of society, but 
we will hold the school responsible for placing and 
holding before the children worthy ideals of conduct 
and of Hfe, and of offering to the children a program 
for realizing these ideals. 



CHAPTER XII 
THE ROOTS OF CHARACTER 

Every one has observed that strength of character 
is not always proportionate to the knowledge which 
one possesses; neither is it always proportionate to 
the fine emotional life of the individual. I wish 
in this chapter to determine as nearly as possible in 
what soil character has its roots; and I mean of course 
here, as elsewhere, by character the ability to stand 
where one should stand and to do as one should do; 
I mean efficiency; I mean that positive characteristic 
of the individual which makes him a stable and valua- 
ble factor in society; I mean the sum total of one's 
capitalization. 

The road that leads to this kind of character has in 
it three stages. The first is the stage of unconscious 
inefficiency. Here the individual is inefficient but does 
not care because he does not know. The second is the 
stage of conscious inefficiency. This is the learning 
stage, the stage of going forward, of capitalizing one's 
self. Here the individual is inefficient and is conscious 
of it and is putting forth more or less effort to over- 
come it. The third is the stage of unconscious effi- 
ciency. It is the stage in which the individual does his 
work as well as it can be done without attending closely 

67 



68 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

to all the details. It has become a matter of habit with 
him, habit in the sense in which the Duke of Welling- 
ton meant it when he said, ''Habit is second nature. 
Habit is ten times nature!" 

These three stages of development may be illus- 
trated in ways familiar to all. In the first few weeks 
or months of its life the child is inefficient as a talker. 
It does not talk and does not try to talk. It is, so 
far as any one knows or can guess, entirely uncon- 
scious of its deficiency. The needed stimulations 
have not been experienced fully enough to arouse the 
child to a consciousness of its deficiency and its needs. 
It is in what we have called the stage of unconscious 
inefficiency. But in the course of time, through the 
suggestions that come to it hourly from its parents 
and brothers and sisters, it begins to imitate them, 
and from that time until it has learned to speak con- 
nected sentences and from then on through its school 
work, in language, grammar, composition, and so on, 
it is living in the stage of conscious inefficiency. It 
does not use the language so forcefully and elegantly 
as it desires to and it is conscious of this fact; it is 
putting forth a conscious effort to gain the skill which 
it does not possess. This is what I call the stage of 
conscious inefficiency. But there will come a time, to 
him who persists in his language development and 
skill, when he will no longer need to think of the nomi- 
native or objective forms, but as naturally as he 
breathes will these forms come when he is expressing 
himself. He can now devote all of his mental and 
physical energy to the development of the thought 



THE ROOTS OF CHARACTER 69 

which he wishes to express and, as a matter of course, 
the language will flow along in fine form. He has 
become the efficient user of the language, but not 
until the day of conscious thought on the language 
forms is past. It is well for the one who wishes to 
become an effective pubUc speaker to study the sub- 
jects of poise, of gesture, of pronunciation, and so on, 
but no one is ever at his best in public speaking who is 
obhged at the time to give any of his thought or con- 
cern to these things. There was a time when it was 
important to give these things thought, to keep them 
in the center of conscious attention, but that is not 
the day of finished public performance. 

The three stages on the road to efficient character 
may be illustrated in learning to play the piano. 
Through the first few months and years of the child's 
hfe it is inefficient as a pianist, but is not at all 
concerned about the deficiency because it is in the 
stage of unconscious inefficiency. The piano is pur- 
chased, the teacher employed, the lesson assigned, and 
the practice begins. From this time forth, for years, 
the energetic, persistent student of the piano is in the 
stage of conscious inefficiency. But if he combines 
native abihty with persistence, the time will come 
when it will be no longer necessary for him to keep 
his eyes upon the music, the keyboard, or his hands, 
but he will be able to lose himself in the emotion he is 
trying to express, and his hands, so to speak, will be 
turning out the music. He who has attained this 
skill has arrived at the stage of unconscious efficiency. 

The simple skills of walking, dressing, of appro- 



70 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

priate adjustments in polite society are all illustra- 
tions of these three stages on the road to strength of 
character. Now if one is never at his best, never 
skillful in the conscious stage, but only in the uncon- 
scious stage, the questions which arise are these : Where 
are the roots of efficient character? What is the soil 
into which runs the taproot of this thing? I wish by 
a few simple illustrations to throw some light upon 
this subject. My friend, a university president, has 
said in my hearing repeatedly that he would not be 
intoxicated in public for any amount of money. He 
might have meant that he would not set going in his 
life the tendency toward this thing, or the appetite 
which he might not be able to control, but he did not 
mean this. He meant that he would not be intoxi- 
cated in public, and by this he meant that there is a 
profounder and broader, a more comprehensive and 
more truthful life than the life which is lived out in 
one's conscious moments; that when the conscious 
senses which serve as chaperons and guards of one's 
life are off duty the real life manifests itself; and that 
although his life had been clean and honorable 
throughout, during his boyhood days there had been 
made through the eye and the ear certain impressions, 
that there had been certain thoughts in the past 
which, when his life should express itself freely with 
the guards off duty, he did not care to have made 
public. In the statement that he would not be 
intoxicated in public for any amount of money this 
wise man was expressing in his own way how funda- 
mental is the substratum of hfe in the making or 



THE ROOTS OF CHARACTER 71 

the unmaking of the permanent character of the 
individual. 

Hypnotism helps us here. The hypnotic subject 
will act upon the suggestion of the hypnotist; and 
when he is brought out of the hypnotic state he will 
not remember his performance while in it. Suppose 
while the subject is under the influence of hypnotism 
the hypnotist should make a test in the form of a 
suggestion, like this: ''To-morrow afternoon at three 
o'clock, wherever you are, you must wave your hat in 
the air and yell for Andrew Jackson." Strange things 
will then follow. The subject will be brought out of 
the hypnotic state and will be unable to remember 
anything that he did while under its influence. 
Until three o'clock the next afternoon he will live 
his normal, conscious life entirely unaware that a 
suggestion is lurking somewhere in the subsoil of his 
being, but it is there, regardless of the fact that he 
does not know it. At three o'clock he will have a 
strange feeling, strange tuggings at his life, and in all 
probability he will say to his companions, ''I have 
queer feelings, I feel as if I were about to do some- 
thing foolish, something unaccountable." Suddenly 
he will raise his arm, wave his hat, and yell for Andrew 
Jackson. Now my question here (which I ask merely 
to throw light upon the topic) is this : Where had the 
suggestion that had been implanted in him during 
his hypnotic state been lurking during the twenty- 
four hours that had elapsed? Certainly not in his 
conscious, normal life, for during these twenty-four 
hours, he was entirely unaware that such a suggestion 



72 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

was waiting to get in its work on him. There is 
something here that suggests that the conservative 
forces are deeper than the conscious hfe, and that 
the roots of character go deeper than the superficial, 
evanescent hfe of normal, waking consciousness. 

The same thing is shown in anaesthesia and in the 
deUrium of fever. Many a man has revealed his true 
character while under the influence of an anaesthetic, 
and many a person has talked out his real life while 
in the dehrium of a fever. Many illustrations could 
be given but none need be. Things that have been 
hidden for years, for decades, have then come to the 
surface. No conscious pull during all these decades 
has been strong enough to bring them up, but when 
life has sloughed off from the top centers down, these 
things that have been hidden in the subsoil for years 
are brought out once more. We have every reason to 
beheve, although we shall probably never be able to 
demonstrate it, that the roots are in what the psychol- 
ogists call the subconscious life. The greatest thing 
you can say about a man in connection with his eflficient 
character is not that he is a great thinker, or that he 
has a strong will, or a fine emotional life. The greatest 
thing is the sum total of his capitalization which has 
been covered up in the region of his subconsciousness. 
And so far as we know, nothing that ever goes into 
the hfe is lost. Everything that goes into a human 
life becomes a permanent part of that life. 

When the incidents of active life are past, when the 
early and later friendships are broken forever and the 
man in his last days stands alone, like some lone oak 



THE ROOTS OF CHARACTER 73 

in the open field, he realizes the truthfulness of the 
lesson here taught, that after all the greatest thing in 
the world that a boy does or that the man does is 
to determine the company that he will have when he 
is old. The old man recalls distinctly the events of 
fifty years ago and less distinctly the events of a dozen 
years ago. 

There are four things which I wish to impress upon 
the reader: first, that the road to efficient character 
has three stages, that of unconscious inefficiency, that 
of conscious inefficiency, and that of unconscious effi- 
ciency; second, that the roots of character are deeper 
than the conscious life; third, that nothing that goes 
into human life is ever lost; and fourth, that when we 
are young, vigorous and active we are providing 
joy or sorrow for the days to come; we are determin- 
ing the company we shall have when we are old. 



CHAPTER XIII 
WILL, THE CENTER OF CHARACTER 

I DO not propose here to go into a psychological 
discussion of the will. I shall make no attempt to 
define or analyze the will, and I am not interested for 
the purposes of this chapter to enter into a discussion 
of the freedom of the will. These are large and im- 
portant questions, but they have no bearing whatever 
upon the topic. The entire world acts as if people 
were free, and in developing this I shall assume that 
the world is right in dealing with people as if they were 
free. If the child were not free to do otherwise than 
he has done in committing a misdemeanor in the 
school, then certainly the teacher would not be justi- 
fied in meting out punishment to him. The ground 
for punishment in the home or in the school, however 
misbehaved the child may be, can be no other than 
that of freedom. With any other assumption the 
child is irresponsible. The institution of the state 
whose organizing idea is justice, exercises the function 
of control or punishment on the assumption of the 
inherent freedom of its citizens to do right. With- 
out the assumption that the people are free to choose 
we cannot assume that they are responsible, and 
without such assumption correction would follow only 

74 



WILL, THE CENTER OF CHARACTER 75 

illogically. On any other basis than that of the 
freedom of people to choose and to will, the world 
would go to pieces. Every man would be a law unto 
himself, which means the absence of all law; and law- 
lessness and anarchy would reign. Without going into 
any psychological or philosophical discussion of the 
question then, I shall assume what the people assume, 
and shall follow out my purpose, which is merely to show 
the place of will; that it is the center in our psychical 
lives; that it is fundamental in the behavior and ef- 
ficiency of the people; that it is pivotal in all conduct; 
that it is the tap root and the only good fruit of the tree 
of hfe. 

The old psychology, so called, always recognized 
the conventional classification of the conscious states 
or activities into intellect, emotion and will. These 
functions of the mind were supposed to be exercised 
in the order named. One became aware of an object 
or situation, cognized it, became intelligent as to it, 
and thus there was aroused in him a desire for it 
or a drawing toward it. He was built up, made 
happy, joyous, glad through it. Or he was pulled 
down, made sad, gloomy, sorrowful, angry by it. 
The emotion was the direct result of the intellect, 
and dependent upon it, was made up and advanced 
by it. If the object created an emotion of pleasure or 
desire, the individual made an effort to secure it, he 
willed to have it; or if the object created the emotion 
of aversion, he decided against it, willed to avoid it. 
Thus the will grew directly out of the emotional life 
and was dependent upon it. The road to mental 



76 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

development was considered a road with three turns, 
the first turn always coming first, the last turn always 
coming last. To illustrate: The student got a taste 
of mathematics incidentally; this constituted his 
knowledge or intelligence of the subject. He liked 
it — which constituted his emotional attitude toward 
the subject — and went after more of it — which con- 
stituted his willing or volitional relation toward the 
subject. 

There is some truth in this theory, but as a theory 
it is partial and inadequate. While I do not profess 
to say the last word upon the will as the center of 
character, I do propose to show that in all life, in the 
making or building of efficient character, will is cen- 
tral, and is both the root and the fruit of the intellec- 
tual and emotional life. It is the soil out of which 
knowledge (intelligence) and emotion, grow. Not only 
this, but it is the only fruitage that they produce. 
A few simple illustrations will make this last point 
clear. 

I have a friend who lectures on history for ''history's 
sake"; but my friend is a very badly puzzled man 
when he is asked to state in clear terms what he 
means by "history's sake." The fact is that neither 
history nor zoology nor mathematics nor any other 
subject taught in the school has a ''sake." History 
and all the rest of them are taught for the sake of 
something else. Why is history taught? The only 
satisfactory answer is, that in performing our duties as 
members of society we shall do better with historic 
knowledge and historic perspective; we shall foreknow 



WILL, THE CENTER OF CHARACTER 77 

the inevitable results of certain proposed plans; we 
shall be better able than otherwise to do the appro- 
priate and best thing. We know that we may do. 
There is no other excuse for knowledge. And the 
doing is the essence of will, because the last end 
of will, if not the entire essence of it, is getting some- 
thing done. All other elements of will are prelimi- 
nary steps or superficial factors. He only knows 
thoroughly who does thoroughly. What is the fruit 
of physiological and hygienic knowledge? It is better 
living. What is the fruit of mathematical knowledge? 
It is the modern railway system, the modern sky- 
scraper, the tunneling of mountains and the irrigation 
of deserts. The only legitimate fruit of mathematics 
is getting the real work done as it otherwise could 
not be done. So in the knowledge that constitutes 
the various professions, that of medicine and surgery, 
for example, the fruitage comes only after the apph- 
cation has been made. Without going more fully into 
illustrations, it is evident, then, that the only legitimate 
function of knowledge is a higher and more appropriate 
form of adjustment or conduct than would otherwise 
be possible. 

The will is just as truly the fruitage of the emotional 
life as it is of the intellect. There is probably no 
mental dissipation in the world so great as that of 
weltering in fine emotions if they issue not in high 
and holy living. Unless the emotional life of the 
individual results in bringing him to a higher plane of 
adjustment, it means demoralization and deterioration. 

One of the much used words in modern pedagogy 



78 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

is "functioning." We have gained the advanced 
ground where we care but little how much the indi- 
vidual knows or how fine is his emotional life unless 
his knowledge and his emotion mean getting him 
somewhere or getting something done. My plea here 
is that the finest fruitage of the intellectual life and of 
the emotional life is will. 

No less is it true that the will is the root as well 
as the fruit of the intellectual and emotional life ; and 
by will I mean doing, adjustment, living, getting the 
task done. Any adult looking at a tree would at 
once pronounce it cylindrical, but no one ever saw a 
cylinder. The adult is able to pronounce it a cylinder 
because all his life he has viewed trees from one side 
and another; and the knowledge that this tree is a 
cylinder is possible to him and comes to him at a 
glance because he has lived in a world of cylinders. 
The fact is that not only one's perceptions but prac- 
tically all the knowledge that one gathers as he goes 
along are the epitome of his past living. If the front 
of a man could go detached down the street, it would 
serve practically all the purposes of a man so far 
as those whom it should meet would be concerned. 
They see the front merely, and that only indefinitely, 
— a mere shadow even of the front, and the rest is 
assumed and thrown in. This is because the indi- 
vidual has always seen the front of a man coming and 
assumed that the rest was there. The superficial 
signs give him knowledge through his past behavior 
and conduct. Daily we pass up and down the street 
and assume the buildings. We would be greatly 



WILL, THE CENTER OF CHARACTER 79 

surprised if some one should tell us that these are 
just rows of fronts. In meeting these things we see 
what we see and assume that which is unseen. If one 
never knew a thing until he knew it first hand in its 
entirety, the number of things learned would be com- 
paratively small. Now the point that I am desirous 
of emphasizing here is that because we have lived, we 
gain knowledge of most things through meager and 
superficial signs and that the great bulk of knowledge 
thus gained, is the direct outcome of the life that is 
producing it. 

And so it is with the emotional life. James and 
Lange say that we are afraid because we run, that we 
are angry because we strike. I shall not argue this 
question here, but merely give it as my conviction 
that they are not only partially but entirely correct 
in their view. Whoever has the poise and the self- 
control to remain perfectly quiet in every fiber of his 
being may judge whether it is wise to run or to strike, 
but until he begins to act he may not have the sen- 
sation of fear or of anger. Those who are not sure 
that this is true and who are therefore inclined to 
reject it, will at least agree that if he who is afraid 
runs, he will become more afraid; and if he who is 
angry strikes, he will become more angry — that in 
this partial sense at least the emotions of anger and 
of fear are the results of the motions of running and 
striking. 

If then the only legitimate excuse for knowledge 
and emotion is the finer and more appropriate adjust- 
ment which is the last end of will; and if the roots of 



80 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

knowledge and emotion are found in the subsoils of 
action or living, it must be plain that will is both the 
root and the fruit and is therefore of fundamental 
importance in our lives. It is in this sense that I 
insist that will is the center of character. 



CHAPTER XIV 
WORK AND CHARACTER 

Two things can be observed the world over: first, 
that as a rule people do as little as is necessary to get 
what they desire, that most people travel the short- 
est road possible to get where they wish to go; and 
second, that whoever will help may help, so that in 
a comparatively short time the lifted is willing to sit 
down on the lifter and ride on through life. As a 
result of these things it has become a problem to the 
parent to know how many doors of opportunity he 
should open to his son or daughter at the risk of 
pauperizing his child. It has become a problem to 
the teacher to know how much assistance he can give 
his student at the risk of rendering him a mental 
pauper. It has become a problem for the wise pastor 
to know how many of the burdens of his people he 
can share with them and bear for them at the risk of 
rendering them social and spiritual paupers. It has 
become a problem for the captain of industry, the 
small one as well as the large one, to know how sym- 
pathetic and considerate he can be of his employees 
and not render them industrial paupers. In this 
chapter I wish to show the close relationship between 
work and character. And by character in this con- 

81 



82 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

nection I do not mean that negative, worthless, 
insipid kind of human Ufe, the absence of everything 
aggressive, whereby the individual manages to keep 
out of the jail and the penitentiary, but I mean 
strength of character, efficient character, ability to 
do things, personal power. I wish to show that these 
characteristics are developed in the life, that one 
imbues himself with power or weakness in the process 
of daily living, and that we are moralized or demoral- 
ized in the daily activities of life; that no amount of 
instruction in ethics will save a man from the king- 
dom of small things if he busies himself in the per- 
formance of small things. 

The Spaniards have a proverb which says, "The good 
is enemy to the best." With the riffraff of humankind 
this is probably not true, but with the more respect- 
able people it is true that the great enemy of the 
best is the good. The people are satisfied to dwell 
upon the low levels of mediocrity and therefore 
they seldom attain the high plateaus of mastery. 
For example, within the last decade long steps for- 
ward have been taken in the construction of modern 
school buildings, in the equipment of modern labora- 
tories, in the building and supplying of large libraries, 
in the professional training of teachers. These steps 
are good. They are even yet too few and too short, 
but they are out of all proportion to the real advance- 
ment that has been made on the part of the children 
who have attended these schools, who have studied in 
these laboratories and these libraries, and who have 
been taught by these professionally trained teachers. 



WORK AND CHARACTER 83 

The advance in knowledge, virility and power that 
the graduates of to-day have made over the graduates 
of a decade ago is microscopically small. With justi- 
fiable pride have the people been congratulating them- 
selves upon the fine advance that has been made. 
Yet unconsciously to themselves, their teachers and 
their parents, the students of the last decade or two, 
have demonstrated the truthfulness of the Spanish 
maxim that "the good is enemy to the best." These 
gains that we have made in the form of equipment 
and well-trained teachers will be of greatest value 
v/hen once it is recognized and realized that they can 
never be of more than secondary importance to the 
student. 

It is said that there are institutions of higher learn- 
ing in this country with long and honorable records in 
which students can pass on a minimum grade of fifty 
and in which it is possible for the student to attain 
his degree without so much as looking at his books 
from the time he enters the institution until he grad- 
uates from it. This may be a false indictment. I 
hope it is, but to a degree at least it is true that many 
young men who spend some of the best years of their 
lives in such institutions decapitalize and demoralize 
themselves, and so are rendered unfit for the later 
duties of fife. In one institution in which I worked 
for four years, my own observation was that the 
high school that sent us on the average the best 
students we had in college was a school with only 
fairly well-trained teachers, very ordinary buildings, 
small laboratories and no well-supplied library. But 



84 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

it was a school in which there was a tradition that 
there is some credit in excelUng and that it is no 
unmanly thing to lead one's class; that it is not 
commendable to see on how small an amount of 
work the student can make his credits. The large 
number of young men and young women who have 
come up to college from these less than average oppor- 
tunities have always stood high in their college 
classes. No other high school in the state with the 
best-trained teachers, the most modern buildings, 
the best laboratory and hbrary facilities, has made 
so good a record. 

The people do not seem to realize that one reason 
why the young man could not wear the King's 
armor was that he had not earned the right to wear 
it. He had never built an armor for himself nor for 
any one else, but he had built many slings and had 
used them effectively, and once again he makes a 
sling and uses it to good purpose. The people do not 
yet seem to realize that the only animal in the world 
that can wear a shell gracefully and with benefit to 
itself is the animal that has built its own shell out of 
its own blood. The people do not seem to realize 
that the only real merit in the world is earned merit, 
and that the only personal power, humanly speaking, 
that there is in the world is self-made power. There 
is but one road to efficient character and that is the 
road of consistent application to something that is 
worth while; and in the making of human life all 
other things, desirable as they may be, are secondary, 
and are valuable only as they contribute to the ease 



WORK AND CHARACTER 85 

and the efficiency of the adjustment of the individual 
to his tasks. The great traits of character which 
make the sum total of human power are valuable 
only through work. It is thus that the trait of over- 
coming is attained, the fruit of which is a fine 
sense of mastery. Through one's accomplishments 
he develops the trait of completeness or incomplete- 
ness, dependent entirely upon the character of his 
performance, because let it never be forgotten that 
one is made or unmade, moralized or demoralized, 
strengthened or weakened, made fit or unfit by his 
work. Nothing is so conducive to a sense of being a 
producer, a real factor, as is the act of producing, of 
getting things done. 

Through work one develops a fine sense of inde- 
pendence, of self-sufficiency and of self-respect. He 
gains the sense of freedom from the slavery of small 
things and small performances and comes into the 
kingdom of a free man. Thus certain beneficent re- 
sults of work are these marks on mind and character, 
and by no other process can they be laid on a man. 
The obverse is just as true because one becomes like 
his work. A bungler does bunglesome work; the 
result of bunglesome work is a bungler. A trifler 
does triffing work; the result of triffing work is that 
the trifler is confirmed as such. Small work means 
small results in the life of the worker as well as in the 
thing done. The result of stealing is a thief. The 
result of a life of sane sacrifice and service is a saint. 
One of the largest problems, therefore, that confronts 
a young person is the selection of his life's work, and 



86 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

it is a problem which he alone can solve. Failure 
and misery have resulted from too much interference 
here. The doors of opportunity should be opened to 
the young person; friendly and unprejudiced advice 
and counsel should be given him; but he has his own 
life to hve, he knows as no one else can the pulls upon 
his mind, his heart and his life. The parent and the 
teacher should render advisory service and should im- 
press upon him with faithfulness the magnitude and 
meaning of this choice. Then he must be left free 
to go his own way, knowing that in the selection and 
execution of the work that he is choosing he must 
work out the pattern of his own life, believing that so 
long as his work contributes to the wealth of the 
world and to his own personal welfare there is posi- 
tively no high nor low except as the spirit of the 
worker makes it so, realizing that whoever does large 
things in a large way becomes large, and that who- 
ever does small things in a small way becomes small. 
To the magnanimous all things are magnanimous and 
all things are magnificent. To the small all people 
are small and all things are mean. 



CHAPTER XV 
PLAY AND CHARACTER 

Play marks the life no less than does work, for all 
activity produces its result in organization and tend- 
ency. Play is the expression of a universal instinct 
in all animal life. This is shown in certain character- 
istics of play. In the first place all animals play; 
there is not an animal form so low, and there is not 
one so high and so complete that, in its youth at 
least, it does not play. The slug (soft snail) plays, 
snakes play, young fowls, young calves, kittens, 
puppies play, — every normally born human being 
plays through childhood and youth; and fortunate is 
he who can remain young throughout all his life and 
who finds pleasure in play. Not only is it true that 
all animals play but each species of animal has its 
own style of play. This is what we should expect, 
because no two organisms are alike and the destinies 
of no two species of animals are the same. All 
animals play instinctively, showing that play is a 
deep-seated function, and in all play there is the 
factor of make-believe, which is one of the marks that 
distinguishes play from work. Many a boy has 
plodded on through a difficult piece of work when he 
has had the imagination to turn it into play. A 
classical illustration of this is Tom Sawyer. 

87 



88 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

An instinct so universal as that of play, and so 
generally expressed, cannot fail to arrest the atten- 
tion of the thoughtful mind and demand an ex- 
planation. The most valuable and satisfactory of 
these explanations is the surplus-energy theory. The 
young are bubbling over with energy, and play serves 
as a safety valve. The mischievous child becomes 
docile through play. In this explanation we doubt- 
less have a true word, — that much of the play in the 
world is due to an exuberance of vitality. But there 
is much play that is not explained in this way. The 
surplus-energy theory must be supplemented by the 
recreation theory. On the same theory that a horee 
will travel farther and tire less on an undulating 
road than he will on a level road, is play found to be 
a method of recreation from the fatigue of work. 
Different muscles are brought into action; different 
stores of energy are set free; the mind is freed from 
the attention that work demanded. A short period 
of play often restores one to his normal state. 

Another theory which helps in the explanation of 
play and is not merely supplementary to the surplus- 
energy theory, is that of preparation for the so-called 
sterner duties of later life. The play of the kitten, of 
the puppy, of the young child, are all prophetic of the 
work of the adult hfe. If a program were to be 
studiously thought out whereby the child in its in- 
fancy and childhood could be trained for its later 
duties of business and professional life, no schedule 
could be planned that would be half so good as the one 
which the child instinctively follows in its play. 



PLAY AND CHAEACTER 89 

One other satisfactory explanation of play is that of 
the recapitulation theory. When damaging news 
comes one sets his teeth, clenches his fist and stamps 
his foot, because his remote ancestors met and over- 
came offensive things (the animal or the enemy) by 
grappling, biting and stamping. So to-day, when the 
author of the damaging news is thousands of miles 
away we display these now useless activities which 
were of greatest value centuries ago. 

Any one who will observe the play of young animals, 
the make-believe of pursuit and fight, and the play 
of young children in their hand-to-hand competitions, 
in unorganized plays and in organized games, cannot 
doubt that their performances are the recapitulation 
of activities once useful in the preservation of the in- 
dividual and the species. 

What now is the close relationship between char- 
acter and this universal instinct to play? I wish to 
make it clear that the relationship here is just as im- 
portant and just as close as that between character 
and work. Play of course is different from work. It 
is the spontaneous expression of the need of the 
individual, and its end is in itself, not in the objective 
task. The fine traits of character brought out here 
as nowhere else come unconsciously. The chance to 
direct oneself, the freedom of choice and action 
which any growing child has the opportunity to 
exercise as a worker, are small, for he goes forth under 
direction, and he and his work are merely means to 
objective results. Play, in developing the instinct 
and power of initiative, exceeds all other oppor- 



90 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

tunities of life combined. Not only this, but play is 
a large factor in socializing the child. Here without 
superior guidance he must learn the fine art of adjust- 
ing himself to others. Indeed the child of ten or 
eleven years of age does not play organized games 
because he has not yet learned the fine art of human 
adjustment, but later on we find him playing on a 
baseball team, and playing other games which require 
co-operation and adaptation. He has become social- 
ized and he is taking the first steps toward efficiency 
in institutional hfe. The child who learns to play as 
he should, who has done well on the athletic or gym- 
nasium teams, will thereby be a stronger member of 
the church, of the state and of all organized institu- 
tions than he otherwise would have been. The great 
difficulty in our organized institutions of civilization 
to-day is that men have not learned the fine art of 
adjustment. 

Through play large results are obtained in the 
physical hfe of the individual. Every one appre- 
ciates the danger incident to athletics and other 
forms of organized play; but the health and physical 
virility and the power to endure punishment are in 
their beneficent results out of all proportion to the 
damage thus done. And no work in the world, men- 
tal or physical, so quickly and certainly makes for 
mental agility, accuracy and decision as does play; 
and the same strong word may be spoken for play in 
behalf of its beneficent moral results. 

But we must not forget here that the most dis- 
astrous results that come to a human being are those 



PLAY AND CHARACTER 91 

that follow the misuse of a good thing. Bad things 
appeal to and injure only bad people. The respect- 
able people in the world are injured by the misuse of 
good things. It is true of the school, of the college, 
of money, of friends, of the church, and it is no less 
true of the fine universal instinct to play. Men have 
become brutal through play; they have laid down 
their physical capital at the altar of play; they have 
become demoralized through play. Promising men in 
our institutions of higher learning have become bound 
hand and foot by play and have made discreditable 
and sometimes dishonorable records as students. 
My point here, it will be observed, is not to pronounce 
a eulogy upon play, neither is it to disparage it, but to 
show its significance. It is to show that through it 
people are made or unmade; that it is a thing that 
cannot be ignored; that whoever ignores it is less 
than human; that there is the very closest relation- 
ship between one's play and one's character; that one 
of the roads to physical, mental and moral efficiency 
is the road of play, if this road runs on life's table- 
lands; and one of the roads to decapitalization in all 
these respects is the road of play if it runs through 
the lowlands of life. Nothing determines character 
more than play, and there is no finer index to charac- 
ter than the kind of play which one enjoys. 



CHAPTER XVI 
PERSISTENCE AND CHARACTER 

In his ''Outlines of Psychology" Royce makes 
much of persistence through restlessness. We all ap- 
preciate the value of initiative. We all find it very 
difficult to tell what we mean by initiative and to 
explain it. Royce throws some light upon this sub- 
ject. Through inherent restlessness one organism 
will persist. In the absence of this restlessness 
another organism does not persist. It quickly be- 
comes quiescent. The stimulations of the former 
result in reactions on the part of the organism entirely 
foreign to anything experienced by the organism 
which becomes early satisfied, and it thus finds new 
environment. So that the restless organism is con- 
tinually doing things which the other one is not, and 
is characterized by what the world calls initiative. 
Probably the zebra is not more stimulated by the har- 
ness which is thrown on his back than is the young 
horse under the same conditions ; but the zebra is rest- 
less : it persists, it will not be broken. The young horse 
with its heredity reaches the stage of quiescence much 
more readily, ceases to be restless, succumbs to civiliza- 
tion and is domesticated. Whether one goes into the 
civilized institutions of men or sits down satisfied to 

92 



PERSISTENCE AND CHARACTER 93 

have but a look-in into these institutions is determined 
largely, if not indeed entirely, by the degree of persist- 
ence or the native restlessness of the organism. Now 
in all probability this restlessness is an inherent, un- 
changeable quantity; but one thing the intelligent 
human being can do which will be of great value to him. 
Recognizing that restlessness is a given unchangeable 
quantity, he may also recognize that the growth in 
persistence, if he is to have any growth here, need not 
be allowed to depend upon the proportionate increase 
in the restlessness. He can substitute knowledge. 
Khowing that since his restlessness is of a compara- 
tively quiescent type he would naturally persist but 
little; knowing that he can, however, attain large 
things only as he persists, he can go forward to 
larger things upon this basis of knowledge and dogged 
determination not to be commonplace and contented 
to stop as he travels up the road of life. The large 
difference in men is that one sits down contented at 
the first turn in the road; the other, because he can- 
not be satisfied, representing it may be no larger 
native ability than the former, pushes on and gains 
an experience and a capitalization in the course of 
time entirely unknown to the former. 

Inherent restlessness is shown in the inquisitive 
child who is changing from one thing to another, 
breaking things to pieces, opening things up, asking 
endless questions. When the mother has answered 
the child's questions to her satisfaction she has only 
started the child on a new set of inquiries. Later 
this inquisitiveness is illustrated by the open-eyed, 



94 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

hungry-minded youth who devours book after book, 
climbs trees, hunts birds' nests, and is interested in 
taking apart and setting up machinery. Later in life 
this principle of persistence through restlessness is 
illustrated by the investigator, — the Wright brothers, 
Marconi. It is not that these men are so much bent 
upon fortune, or even upon startling the world or 
rendering it a great service, I fancy, as it is that they 
are restless, they sense something ahead. Their dis- 
coveries will be of great value to the world, but they 
are not held to the task so much by a sense of being 
of large service (although this has its place in their 
minds) as by the nervous push which will not allow 
them to stop. Many another man may long to 
render as large a service but his temperament is such 
that he is not goaded on along the lines of investiga- 
tion. One of the large results of persistence through 
restlessness is that many men of only average en- 
dowment are occupying large and responsible posi- 
tions in all lines of professional and business life. The 
important places in education, in law, in the ministry, 
in medicine are thus filled by men of average endow- 
ment. On the other hand, many men of large native 
endowment are occupying small places; they are 
men early satisfied, they have quiescent tempera- 
ments; they have the native capacity to master 
almost anything if they could get to it, but they do 
not have the persistence that carries them to the task 
and the large opportunity; and so regardless of their 
comparatively large endowment they do compara- 
tively small work in the world. 



PERSISTENCE AND CHARACTER 95 

Some years ago President W. L. Bryan, of Indiana 
University, conceived the notion through his obser- 
vation and experiments that many people become 
''near-great," that they in all probability stop just 
short of realizing the best there is in them, or better 
things than they have yet realized; that they take 
out the papers of citizenship in the country in which 
they have been dwelling because they have not quite 
persistence enough to cross the border into the land 
of larger promise. President Bryan's student, Noble 
Harter, an expert telegrapher, opened up a field of 
experiment in the telegraphic language. Through this 
experiment they found that practically all the young 
people who begin to learn the telegraphic language 
make rapid improvement at the beginning. In the 
first weeks they are encouraged with their prog- 
ress; but as the weeks go forward progress is made 
much more slowly; and after all, the large per- 
centage of those who begin to learn the telegraphic 
language give it up just before they become pro- 
ficient enough to make it pay or to take charge of a 
small office. The small percentage, those who finally 
acquire the language, did not in all probability make 
more rapid gains than those who gave it up, but they 
persisted, they were restless, or, as I have suggested 
before, they knew that they must persist, and in 
a comparatively short time they were born into a 
higher kingdom of skill and efficiency. These are the 
people who are in the small telegraphic offices the 
country over. Now many of these become satisfied 
with their attainments; they do not seek greater skill; 



96 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

they have reached the stage of quiescence; and so we 
have all over the country men and women in the 
comparatively small offices who have been there for 
many years. But others are not thus easily satisfied. 
They put forth every effort to improve. The im- 
provement is slow ; they move as it were on a plateau ; 
they do not show greater efficiency than they did 
months before, but in the case of most of these the 
experience is that finally and very suddenly the oper- 
ator is able to do work of an entirely different class 
from that in which he has been working. Then there 
comes to him the plateau experience again. It is a 
long road and a monotonous one, but if he persists he 
will in the course of time reclassify himself. So 
Mr. Bryan and Mr. Harter found that there are three 
or four stages of skill and efficiency in the telegraphic 
language. There is the stage where one is able to 
take the small office; there is the advanced stage of 
the good operator; and there is the more advanced 
stage of the expert. The expert in the first few weeks 
and months of his apprenticeship showed no more 
native ability than those who remained upon the low 
level a lifetime. Indeed he may not have shown 
more ability than the large percentage of those who 
dropped out before they had attained the lowest 
level. To-day in his profession he is a picked man, 
an expert, due entirely, the psychologists think, to 
the fact that he could not be satisfied, that he was 
restless, that he was persistent, that he would go up 
the road even though he must climb hills, and the 
eminence that he has attained in his profession is the 



PERSISTENCE AND CHARACTER 97 

result of such persistent climbing. He is a strong 
character, an efficient character in his business. A 
close relationship exists between persistence and 
character. 

We are not all interested in the telegraphic language, 
but whoever thinks is interested in the meaning of 
this experiment and its application to the lives of 
the people. The bright, lazy fellow is satisfied when 
he accomplishes seven out of the ten problems or 
seventy per cent of anything. He goes through the 
schools with his minimum of accomplishment and out 
into life with a minimum of attainment and a maxi- 
mum of decapitalization through his lack of applica- 
tion. The inevitable results of this kind of thing are 
small things, subjectively and objectively. His class- 
mate, "slow in the head," achieves with difficulty, 
but he cannot sleep until the work is accomplished; 
he is restless under the unaccomplished task. He 
has a dogged persistence. It costs midnight oil and 
human energy, but when the new day dawns ten of 
the ten problems have been solved. He goes through 
school in this way. He comes out not only with a com- 
paratively large attainment but with a character of 
steel, and in the course of years he comes to occupy 
large and responsible positions. 

But an even higher result of persistence is that it 
leads the individual to self-discovery. The person 
who can be satisfied to dwell in the lowlands is stim- 
ulated only by the things that are in the lowlands 
and he is never led to the real discovery of himself. 
Here is the great chance and the great function of 



98 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

the high school and the college. Many a man has 
been a misfit throughout his entire life because he 
did not persist until he reached the physical labora- 
tory. Many a girl has been a misfit throughout 
life because she has not persisted in attending to the 
courses in English, in art and in music that the 
schools offer. It is a fortunate thing for the young 
person who has traveled the long and tortuous road 
of the common schools, the high school and the first 
three years of college, when the stimuli come flooding 
into his life during his senior year which reveal him 
to himself, and he realizes that he has found himself, 
his place and his work. He who persists not has not 
these stimuli, and therefore in all probability self- 
discovery may never come to him, and instead of 
doing his own piece of work, he goes on through life 
doing just anybody's work, which has about the 
value of nobody's work. The most pathetic situ- 
ation in the world is to find young people of large 
endowment who lack native persistence or whose 
parents or teachers have not persisted for them until 
they have learned the lesson for themselves: they sit 
down at the first crossroads of life, down in the low- 
lands, and are satisfied. Fortunate indeed is the 
young person who is not early satisfied ; the way may 
not be clear, the road, so far as he is able to see it, 
may be a crooked and a rough one, but whatever it 
is there is an inner impulse which makes him travel 
it. And fortunate indeed is the young person who as 
he travels the road can see the footprints of the men 
and the women who have traveled it before him, who 



PEESISTENCE AND CHARACTER 99 

has every reason to believe that it can be traveled, 
and keeps on and on until he finds his place, until he 
discovers himself and makes the adjustment to life 
which enables him to do his work. 

Persistence simply means exposure, nothing more. 
Exposure should mean experience; experience means 
capitalization, and this spells out power. The young 
men and young women with hungry minds, not 
easily satisfied, who persist at great cost, have things 
ahead of them. But many are not so fortunate as to 
be thus endowed with the hungry mind and the rest- 
less temperament. Let them know that their only 
hope is in going forward. Let them recognize that 
there are but small things ahead of the person who is 
willing to travel only the short road. Let them 
realize that whoever fails to persist falls short of the 
outer stimulations and the appropriate inner develop- 
ment necessary to the finest type of efficient character 
of which the individual is capable. 



CHAPTER XVII 
CHOICE AND CHARACTER 

The relationship existing between the choices of an 
individual and his character is a very close one. 
The significance of choice cannot be overemphasized, 
for at every turn of life it must be exercised. One's 
advancement is thus determined. He must go on or 
stop, and this involves choice. And if he chooses to 
go forward there are many ways open to him, and he 
must choose which one of these ways he will pursue. 
So that from earliest childhood to the end of life there 
is one continual procession of choices. We are apt to 
choose what we desire, and when there is a conflict of 
desires we are apt to follow the stronger; but desire 
may be inherent, and it may just as easily be a pull 
down as a push up. It is just as apt to be in the 
direction toward death as toward the more abundant 
life. Every one has realized in his own experience 
that the bare native desires of a human being are 
not always final criteria of the direction he should 
take. As one accumulates experience he may of 
course desire what is best in the long run although 
not most gratifying at the present, but this of course 
means that one has already lived and that he has 
accumulated experience. It demands sufficient past 

100 



CHOICE AND CHARACTER 101 

experience to serve as a perspective, to give him in- 
sight into the long run ahead. There is always 
found here a conflict between the strong inclination 
to gratify the present desire and what would be best 
in the long run. And even in mature life the desire 
for present gratification, for the short run, sometimes 
prevails. The objective stimuli outweigh the sub- 
jective ideals and the prospective benefits to be 
derived from following them; so that all along the 
road of life one never becomes so capitalized and so 
fully the master of himself that he does not at times 
feel the waging of the conflict in making his choices. 
How are our young people with small experience, 
with practically no perspective, to be helped in de- 
ciding for the good in the long run against the desire 
for present gratification? In other words, how may 
our young people have the hope, the enthusiasm, the 
prospect of the young, and at the same time the 
judgment and the wisdom of the mature in making 
their choices? This is a condition greatly to be de- 
sired and never to be realized. I hope that the sug- 
gestions that I make here will have some value in 
helping to approximate it. 

[First, choice is largely a matter of naming or 
classifying. Our young people can be taught this as 
a fact, as they are taught the multiplication table as 
a fact or the verb forms of their mother tongue 
as a fact. They can if need be commit it to memory. 
By copious illustrations this can be made very clear to 
the mind of the average young person. Whether 
young men decide upon a certain course of action or 



102 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

not depends very largely indeed upon their classi- 
fication or naming of the thing they propose to do or 
desist from doing. On the Fourth of July or at 
Christmas time if young men say, "This day comes 
but once a year; we should appreciate it and be 
good fellows together. A little wine must be taken 
for the stomach's sake. This is an occasion for merri- 
ment and not for long faces. Everything is made 
to be used; it is too bad to let a good thing that 
costs so much go to waste," they will in all proba- 
bility, with very little sense of wrong, imbibe freely. 
But if, on the other hand, they name it differ- 
ently, if they make a different classification; if, for 
example, they say, "This may result in drunkenness 
to-day, in a bad head to-morrow, in misery in the 
home; this thing may set up tendencies toward an 
all-conquering appetite which will in the long run be 
ruinous; this act classifies us with all those who im- 
bibe, with those who are to-day in the jails and peni- 
tentiaries, in the gutters and in the madhouses," they 
will, in all probability, desist. In either case the 
bare act would be the same, but classifying it as 
innocent merriment enables them to go in, and clas- 
sifying it as a strong pull toward ruin they stay 
out. 

The same thing is true in the simple virtue of 
obedience in the family or in the state. If one classi- 
fies it as the basis for institutional harmony and in- 
stitutional efficiency, he will gladly obey those in 
authority and will insist upon complete obedience; 
but if he classifies it as an imposition by those in 



CHOICE AND CHARACTER 103 

authority, he will resent it and will be disobedient to 
the point of disaster to his own life. 

Every one who spends six days a week in the 
factory, mill or shop feels the physical and mental 
need of outdoor recreation. One must have the 
sunshine, the fresh air, the uplift that comes from a 
trip into the country, a half day in the park or 
a cross-country automobile drive. Of course these 
things are needful, and so of course our clean, high- 
minded, law-abiding citizens in numbers too large to 
be told are spending their Sundays in this way. But 
if, on the other hand, it is important that the people 
from time to time should be still before God, that 
they should commune together and with Him, that they 
should meditate upon the best, that Sunday should 
be a holy day and not a holiday; if it is more im- 
portant to observe the Sabbath as a holy day than it 
is that one's business should prosper; if it is clearly 
seen and said that the desecration of Sunday is a 
fatal blow to the foundations of our civilized life, — 
then the parks of amusement will be closed, the 
white cities will cease their operations, and Sunday 
will cease to be a day of whoop and hurrah and 
general fussiness, and will become a day of quiet 
meditation and holy devotion to higher things. The 
path into which one's feet turn on Sunday morning 
is determined almost entirely by the classification of 
the opportunity which the day affords. 

The same thing is true of the use of profanity. 
Men often say that they must do the subject justice 
and that a good ''cussing out" is the only thing that 



104 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

can be done. They forget that profanity is the means 
that small minds employ to express themselves 
emphatically. The other men simply classify pro- 
fanity in another category. 

I heard a man in a high official position say that 
women have no smuggling conscience. He was pro- 
voked to this statement by the fact that women of 
high social standing and intelligence and positions of 
honor in the church had smuggled large quantities of 
goods through the customhouse, and by the merest 
accident had been caught. Now these women would 
not have been guilty of the offense of stealing from the 
government or from an individual, of taking things 
outright; they made this serious mistake through 
failure to classify the act as one of theft. 

The country boy does not hesitate a moment to 
play a joke on his neighbor by taking a watermelon 
from his field, but he could not be hired to steal a 
watermelon from his neighbor. It is the same act 
in either case. Call it a joke and he goes in; call it 
theft and he stays out. Now, as was stated in a 
former paragraph, we can help our young people by 
teaching them outright the best names to apply to 
certain conduct, and when they have definite styles 
of conduct labeled correctly their behavior will like- 
wise be correct. 

In the second place, we can teach our young people 
outright, as we do the multiplication table or the 
verb forms, that choice is largely a matter of atten- 
tion; that as a man thinketh in his heart, that is, 
as he attends with his life, as he focuses himself upon 



CHOICE AND CHARACTER 105 

a thing, so is he. So that if the objects of attention 
now present to the individual are not conducive to 
what he knows to be right choices, he can flee them as 
he would a pestilence and bring himself into a human 
and institutional environment which will offer him 
objects of attention conducive to this right choosing. 
If the eye offend thee, pluck it out. This may be 
done by plucking out the thing that appeals to the 
individual through the eye, and this is most readily 
done by plucking oneself away from the presence of 
such an object. And if the hand offend thee, cut it 
off. This may best be done by cutting off the thing 
that the hand grasps, by cutting oneself off from 
the presence of the thing which is an offense through 
the hand. We can teach young people that thinking 
and doing are one and the same thing, merely obverse 
sides one of the other; that as one attends, his choice 
is determined, and that the only way of choosing 
the best is to go away from the objects that lure us 
downward. 

Now there are certain large and comprehensive 
choices which determine the multitude of smaller 
choices and which are fraught with the greatest re- 
sponsibility. The choice of one's occupation, for 
example, will determine to a large degree the character 
of all the later choices which follow in the prosecu- 
tion of the occupation. The choice of one's lifemate 
will affect the character practically of all the choices 
that are made in after life. The choice of one's 
occupation involves no smaller question than this, the 
thing that one decides to spend his life with; and the 



106 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

choice of one's mate determines no smaller question 
than this, the person with whom one decides to spend 
his life. These are the largest choices of life, and in 
the making of them our young people should be helped, 
not driven, to classify materials of choice on the 
highest, sanest and truest basis. What is a man's 
life work to be? Give it the right name, classify it 
correctly and attend to right things in determining it, 
and the choice will be well made. Who is a man's 
mate to be? Define it right and attend to the right 
character in making the choice and the choice will be 
well made. There is nothing so important to the 
human life, humanly speaking, as these comparatively 
early and exceedingly large choices, and yet many 
young people make them more hurriedly, more 
thoughtlessly, with less judgment and less counsel, 
than they would exercise in the smallest business trans- 
action. They take the remainder of life to repent. 
The road through life that one travels determines 
his environment, his stimuli, and to a large extent 
his objective opportunities; and these determine in a 
very large measure his life reactions and his conduct. 
There is therefore nothing of greater importance 
than the large choices of life, and we certainly have 
here the crux of human responsibility. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
THE SCHOOL AND CHARACTER 

We have seen in previous chapters the part the 
school has in determining the ideals of the children. 
In this chapter I wish to emphasize the value of the 
school as an institution in which the method of 
realizing these ideals can be taught. Chapter XIV 
insists upon application or work as the only sure and 
legitimate method. To realize on himself and his 
ideals the individual must choose his work and then 
apply himself to it. 

What is the opportunity offered by the school for 
developing in the child the power and habit of wise 
choice and effective application? I wish to make it 
plain that the opportunities here are as numerous as 
the steps taken from the moment the child enters the 
school until the hour he graduates from it. It is a 
program of choice and apphcation from beginning to 
finish. The course that the child takes in the mastery 
of every assignment is to be chosen by him. There 
is the opportunity for exercise of judgment at every 
step. Take, for example, his work in arithmetic. 
Any problem that has in it a half dozen steps requires 
the exercise of judgment and choice a half dozen 
times; and any problem that requires a hundred 

107 



108 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

steps in its solution requires likewise the exercise of 
judgment and choice a hundred times. I know of no 
field in the so-called affairs of later Ufe which de- 
mands that right choice be made in order that right 
results may be obtained to a higher degree than does 
the work in arithmetic, and the mathematics that 
follow it in the higher grades. The same demand 
for conscientious exercise of judgment and choice is 
found in the chemical laboratory. The questions are 
always arising, — what things shall be used, how 
much, in what proportions, in what way, how long, 
when is the experiment concluded and what, after 
all, are the legitimate deductions that can be made 
from it? Choice is no less demanded in all the other 
subjects of study than in these two which I have 
used merely by way of example; biology, physics, 
algebra, geometry, grammar offer the same chance. 

Whether the management of athletics has always 
been wise or not is not here the question. Sometimes 
it has been wise, sometimes it has been unwise. But 
athletics has rendered great service to the school and 
to the world. Football, for example, has demon- 
strated to the satisfaction of every one sufficiently 
wide awake to get the lesson, that a man simply 
cannot do his best unless he is at his best. This 
principle is demonstrated objectively and in a com- 
paratively coarse way on the gridiron, but it applies 
just as truly to the work of the teacher at his desk or 
to the preacher in the pulpit as it does to the athlete. 
If the athlete is not tingling with vitality, if he is not 
at his best, he cannot play the game. If the minister 



THE SCHOOL AND CHARACTER 109 

or the teacher is at less than his best then he cannot 
get the finest results. 

Now athletics offers a fine field for quick judgment 
and right choice. The shortstop has no time after 
receiving the ball to consult with the captain as to 
what he shall do with it. Quicker almost than 
thought, if men are on second and third bases a good 
shortstop will do the appropriate thing, which might 
have been the most inappropriate thing if men were 
not on second and third. In all the hours of practice 
and play, quick action, accurate action and correct 
action are demanded. The same thing is true of 
the quarter back in the game of football. He must 
detect at a glance the weak place in the opposing 
team; he must detect at a glance which of his own 
men are at their best, and which are undertoned; he 
must be quick to accept every slip on the part of 
the opposition. The judgments and the choices of 
the quarter back in the game of football are almost 
as important as the training of the team in the days 
that precede the game. 

So that the school in its work and in its play offers 
continued and varied opportunities for the develop- 
ment of the power and the habit of wise choice. It 
offers no less opportunity for the development in the 
child of the power and habit of persistent, consistent, 
effective application. After all, the great word in 
pedagogy, as in life, is getting it done, human adjust- 
ment, accomplishing the task, and thereby accom- 
plishing the much larger and more important work of 
one's own life. Neither the shop, the factory nor the 



110 FUNDAMENTAL FACTS FOR THE TEACHER 

office in after life will offer such systematic and varied 
opportunities for the development of this power of 
application as does the school. No man at his desk 
or in the factory is obliged to apply himself more 
faithfully, intensely and consecutively to the task in 
hand than is the student who is plowing his way 
through the subject of quadratics. And probably a 
single misstep in the work at the desk or in the factory 
would not result so disastrously to the end desired 
as would a single misstep in the solution of a problem 
in quadratics. The same thing is true of the mastery 
of an assignment in Virgil, in biology, in history. 
Mastery in all these lines demands consecutive, uni- 
form, intelligent application, just such application as 
the world will demand in later life, just such appUca- 
tion as the world to-day is demanding and which it 
is not always securing. 

Manual training, which has gone forward so rapidly 
in our schools within the last ten years, offers a fine 
chance here. Not only the industrial world but the 
professional world in the next decade will have more 
willing and worthy workers in it as a result of the 
power and habit of effective application that our 
young men by the thousands are gaining in the 
manual-training schools. The school offers as does 
no other institution, during the plastic years, — which 
because they are plastic are therefore the hopeful 
years, — the opportunity for imbedding into the char- 
acters of the young the habits of exactness and appli- 
cation which will be valuable assets throughout life. 

The great chance of the school and therefore the 



THE SCHOOL AND CHARACTER 111 

great function of the school is a threefold one. First, 
from the beginning to the finish, it offers a vast 
variety of organized stimulations to the child which 
are calculated to bring into activity all of his tend- 
encies upward and to allow to remain inactive the 
tendencies downward. The inevitable result of this 
is that the tendencies downward will become arrested 
in their development and that they will be elimi- 
nated through disuse, and that the tendencies up- 
ward, through these long and systematic stimulations, 
will be developed until they reach the place of mastery 
in one's life. In the second place, the school offers 
the child a long list and a vast variety of oppor- 
tunities for choice. No school can fail entirely in 
these opportunities; and, other things being equal, the 
school which meets this demand most fully is the 
best school. In the third place, the school should 
give the child a long list of varied chances to apply 
himself in getting results and in overcoming. This is 
the only method that will result in that degree of effi- 
ciency which every department of life needs so much. 
The school, then, is not so much an institution for the 
imparting of facts as it is an institution for the build- 
ing of character through its own stimulations, and 
through the choices and applications of the students. 



SEP I '19JI 



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